Finally, Change Is Coming to a Broken Health-Care System

Commentary

The Alberta government is taking a bold, necessary step towards finally fixing the broken Canadian health-care model.

And while many activists and academics may aggressively wag their fingers and shake their fists at Premier Danielle Smith’s reforms, they can rest easy. If they wag or shake too aggressively and break something, they’ll at least have better access to health care to get it fixed.

Smith announced this week that Alberta will keep its public health-care system, but allow patients to pay for private surgery if they want to. This is a huge change. Generally speaking, as it stands now, Quebec is the only jurisdiction in Canada where patients have this right.

These bans on paying for treatment outside of the public system make Canada an outlier when it comes to  universal health-care systems around the world. Name one with better results and shorter wait times: France, Sweden, Japan, the list goes on. All of them allow patients to pay for surgery, while maintaining their public, universal systems.

Of course, there are several other ways their systems are better than Canada’s, but for the moment, let’s focus on patient choice.

It’s a fairly simple concept. When patients are allowed to pay for care, it takes a lot of pressure off of the public system. Every time that someone decides to pay, everyone behind them on the waitlist moves up a spot.

Smith’s policy will also ensure that resources aren’t taken from the public system, as doctors will have a requirement of performing a minimum amount of publicly-funded surgeries before they can work in private settings.

It’s worth noting that, for years, polls have shown that Albertans and Canadians broadly want to see choice in health care. A SecondStreet.org-commissioned Leger poll from early November showed 59 percent of Canadians support allowing patients to pay for care.

It just makes sense. The status quo has had Canadians stuck with two choices: wait around for health care and suffer, or travel somewhere else.

Travelling for private care is definitely understandable. Think about Alberta patient Jeff Krushell. He lives near Edmonton and suffered from a serious chronic back condition that left him in crippling pain. The public system told him he would have to wait over a year for treatment. Jeff did some research, and found a private clinic just down the road in Calgary that performed the surgery he needed.

But as an Albertan, he wasn’t allowed to pay for care in his own province. So, rather than suffer and put his life on hold, he travelled to the United States for surgery.

How much sense does this make? Rather than force Jeff to either live in extreme pain or leave the country, why shouldn’t he be allowed to spend his own money to improve his health?

He’s not the only one. SecondStreet.org recently interviewed  four Alberta women who had all travelled to Lithuania for orthopedic surgeries. And while I was in Lithuania at that same clinic following a Manitoba patient’s journey, I just so happened to bump into an Alberta woman who was there for a knee surgery.

Stories like these illustrate just how backwards the Canadian health care system has been. And it’s not some new problem.

It doesn’t matter which province or which party is in power: wait times have been steadily getting worse, even as governments have nearly doubled health-care spending since the early 1990s. Patients have been suffering and dying on waitlists while the raw number of patients waiting has grown.

That’s because no government has made deep, systemic changes. Until now, that is.

Keep your eyes on Alberta. No matter what the naysayers might say, allowing choice is a proven step towards better, quicker access to care. Now, it’s time for the rest of the country to follow suit.

Dom Lucyk is the Communications Director for SecondStreet.org, a Canadian think tank.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.