Ford’s nervousness is understandable, given that many Canadians have an almost Pavlovian reaction to hearing the words “private” and “healthcare” nearby. Much of the media coverage following the prime minister’s announcement certainly seems to confirm the concerns, with progressive outlet headlines accusing Ford of “privatizing hospitals” and “moving to privatize health care in Ontario.” has taken a dramatic step in A Toronto Star cartoon depicts Ford driving a hearse and a sign reading “Universal Health Care on Board.”
Ontario’s opposition, the New Democrats, has vowed to fight “Ford’s plan to privatize healthcare,” while National Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh has called for Progressive Conservative leader Ford to “cannibalism“Public Health and Millions of Taxes”CEO of for-profit American Style Care.”
The shamelessness of such rhetoric is astonishing. For little reason other than to escalate public ignorance and anxiety about the state of health care in Canada.
Canada’s public healthcare system has always been based primarily on government-provided health. insurancebeing run by the provinces, Canada differs from public systems like the UK, which are based on a single system of government administration. provider — in the UK, the National Health Service — runs hospitals and directly employs doctors, nurses and surgeons. Government-run hospitals are the norm in Canada, but many other medical services that Canadians rely on are provided by private companies (especially doctors) who simply bill government insurance plans. According to the Commonwealth Fund, about 80% of Canadian doctors work as private practitioners in some form.
At a press conference, Ford himself said public insurance coverage for privately-run services has long been part of the Ontario state of affairs.
Unfortunately, Canadians often seem oblivious to this reality. The casual understanding of Canadian healthcare tends to be far more dogmatically black and white than the system itself, with the private and public sectors supposed to be in a zero-sum battle in which only one survives. Such naivety was made possible by the anti-American patriotism cult prevalent in Canada. In Canada, “free healthcare” is always claimed as Canada’s defining advantage. self-pay). This is a proven myth good for nation-building and political demagogues, but not so good for actually maintaining quality healthcare for Canadians themselves.
Despite the fear-mongering about his “privatization plan,” what Ford is actually trying to do is very similar to nationalization. With chronic capacity problems in public hospitals leading to unprecedentedly high wait times for all types of surgery in Canada, the Government of Ontario has made non-governmental clinics legally impossible. We seek to alleviate some of this pressure by allowing medical procedures to be performed. Refunds to members of the general public who use them. The setup bears no resemblance to Canadian folklore’s march to the “American-style” Horror His Story. Ford says, “You can access these services with an OHIP card, it’s never your credit card.”
The various heated commentaries written in response to Ford’s announcement do little to dispute these facts. So much relies on empty slogans. Critics of Ford can only glean theories, not the concrete. By incorporating more private clinics into the public system, perhaps Final Lure some surgeons out of public hospitals. Alternatively, private clinics could, in theory, sometimes, trying to “up-sell” to the idiotic public what government insurance doesn’t cover. (“A sick person under pressure to have surgery is an easy mark of pressured sales tactics,” worried one columnist).
It’s worth remembering that the alternative to these abstract worries is the immediate reality: a drastic decline in quality of life, even death, is within the tolerance of a wealthy country like Canada. caused by essential medical procedures that were delayed far beyond
Would it be better to wait to die in a public hospital than to get free care in a private hospital? In the hyper-ideological world of Canadian health care discourse, it seems like an argument to be taken seriously.
