Exposing The Flaws Of Canada's Universal Healthcare System

EDITOR'S NOTE: Canada's universal healthcare system is often held up as a model for the rest of the world to follow. With its promise of free, comprehensive care for all, it's easy to see why. But is the reality of Canada's healthcare system as rosy as its proponents would have us believe? This article takes a close and critical look at Canada's healthcare system and debunks the myths surrounding it. From long wait times and rationed care to bureaucratic inefficiencies and lack of innovation, we'll examine the many shortcomings of Canada's socialist healthcare system. While there are certainly aspects of the system that work well, it's important to acknowledge its limitations and consider alternative approaches that might better serve the needs of patients.

The provision of private healthcare in Canada is contingent on the ability of private actors to satisfy all of the conditions embedded within government legislation. However, the severity of these conditions means that most aspects of private healthcare are essentially outlawed, as they have been for many decades.

Perhaps that wouldn’t matter if the government kept the promise it made to Canadians when it arbitrarily imposed universal healthcare (Medicare) on the country. The government promised “to make sure that people could get care when it was needed without regard to other considerations” (emphasis added).

The government breaks this promise on a daily basis. Currently, there are approximately 1.2 million Canadians stuck on a government waiting list for healthcare that they need. This is a death sentence for many of them, as it has been for thousands of patients who have gone before them.

Politicians Are Guilty of Criminal Acts

When the failure of Medicare became undeniable many decades ago, the government should have repealed the legislation because it was obvious that they could never keep their promise. However, they didn’t repeal the legislation. They continued the charade. The federal government still insists that its primary objective is “to protect, promote and restore the physical and mental well-being of residents of Canada and to facilitate reasonable access to health services without financial or other barriers” (emphasis added).

Patients who endure considerable suffering as they languish on a waiting list—where many of them die—cannot be seen to have been given reasonable access to health services in the government’s Medicare system. The government also prevents them from having reasonable access to a private healthcare option.

Thus, reasonable access is an obvious deception, with benefits flowing to highly paid, power-hungry politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators wanting to maintain control over massive, inefficient healthcare bureaucracies at the federal and provincial levels. This deceitful behavior fits the definition of fraud and should be prosecuted as such.

Thousands of Canadians die while they wait for the care that the government promised to deliver when they needed it. That’s bad enough, but due to the prohibition of private healthcare, politicians have prevented these patients from saving their own lives. That’s a criminal offense! Section 262 of the Canada Criminal Code reads:

262 Every person is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than 10 years or is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction who

(a) prevents or impedes or attempts to prevent or impede any person who is attempting to save his own life, or

(b) without reasonable cause prevents or impedes or attempts to prevent or impede any person who is attempting to save the life of another person.

Section 262 (a) should apply when a patient is prevented from saving their own life because private healthcare is forbidden.

Section 262 (b) should apply when a private doctor is prevented from saving the life of another person because private healthcare is forbidden.

All politicians, past and present, who have supported Medicare legislation should be prosecuted for fraud. Likewise, those who have supported the suppression of private healthcare should be prosecuted under Section 262. In both cases, politicians should also be subject to civil action. Unfortunately, none of this will happen because, in a democracy, politicians are not governed by the same laws as the rest of the population.

Politicians Are Legally Untouchable

If politicians were personally accountable for the damage they caused, guess what? They wouldn’t cause any damage! However, we cannot hold them personally accountable because equality under the law does not exist in a democracy.

In the private sector, you are accountable for your own actions. If you break your neighbor’s window, you pay for the replacement. If you are a politician and you break the window in the course of performing your official duties, you can charge the cost of the new window to taxpayers. Moreover, in a democracy, taxpayers have no control over political actions, as two American professors have warned us:

The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. . . . The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.

Politicians say that society can grow and prosper only if politicians make laws to grant themselves legal immunity for actions they undertake in the performance of their public duties. So, that’s what they do, and that’s what most people do not understand. The lack of accountability is a symptom of democracy. It encourages bad decisions within the political class. It encourages inefficiency, as we see with the ongoing deterioration of Medicare.

When citizens demand better service, politicians respond by saying, “Okay, but that means we have to take more of your money.” So, taxes are raised, more bureaucrats and administrators are hired, and the inefficient Medicare bureaucracies that politicians and bureaucrats regard as their personal fiefdoms grow ever larger. That’s why healthcare is the single largest item in many provincial budgets. As Bruce L. Benson wrote:

The fact that government law has taken over as much as it has is not a reflection of the superior efficiency of representative government in making or enforcing law that facilitates interaction. It is, rather, a reflection of government’s general purpose of transferring wealth to those with political power.

The expressed aim of government officials in a representative democracy may not be the accumulation and centralization of power, but that is a necessary consequence of the process as it has evolved within the institutions developed by medieval kings. Whether the government producing law is a totalitarian king or a representative democracy, power is centralized and coercion is used to impose rules beneficial to some upon the rest of the population. Government is still a wealth transfer mechanism.

The legacy media parrots the government’s healthcare mantra that demonizes private firms seeking to profit through the provision of healthcare. However, the same media remains silent about politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators who have profited greatly from monopolizing an industry that allows them to determine their own salaries, resulting in lengthy wait lists, thousands of preventable deaths, a surplus of highly paid bureaucrats and administrators, and a dearth of the stuff that actually matters, such as doctors, nurses, hospital rooms, medical equipment, life-saving medicines, etc.

This government/media propaganda is becoming less effective due to the ongoing collapse of Medicare. A majority of Canadians polled are now in favor of private healthcare for those who are able to afford it. If and when that happens, Canadians will discover the superiority of private healthcare, where full accountability makes it far more efficient and cost effective, and much less lethal, compared to the government’s Medicare scam, which was gifted to Canadians under the guise of democracy.

Originally published by: Lee Friday on Mises Institute