Father of Canadian Health Care System Says It’s Failed

Proponents of single payer health care systems or universal health care systems or whatever euphemism they are using these days will tell you that this is the only way to get everyone covered. But, Claude Castonguay, known as “the father of Quebec medicare,” says it’s a failure in Canada:

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

When the government controls something like health care, you end up with shortages. After shortages, you get rationing. When you can’t get what you want via rationing, you have to go outside the system. Here is how that works in Canada when you are sick:

Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.

And you can’t have a story like this without an example of the cold, faceless entity known as bureaucracy:

The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires’ case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn’t properly filled out a form. At death’s door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better.

We do not have a perfect system. We will never have a perfect system as long as it is designed by humans. But the idea that giving government control of your health care is the solution to our woes is not only ignorant, but dangerous. Canada and Great Britain are shining examples of that point.

Canada isn’t the only country facing a government health care crisis. Britain’s system, once the postwar inspiration for many Western countries, is similarly plagued. Both countries trail the U.S. in five-year cancer survival rates, transplantation outcomes and other measures.

The problem is that government bureaucrats simply can’t centrally plan their way to better health care.

A typical example: The Ministry of Health declared that British patients should get ER care within four hours. The result? At some hospitals, seriously ill patients are kept in ambulances for hours so as not to run afoul of the regulation; at other hospitals, patients are admitted to inappropriate wards.

If you want to make America’s health care system better, more government is not the solution. Less government is.