Sabrina Maddeaux: After two years of pandemic failures, Canadians are ready to talk private health care – By Sabrina Maddeaux (National Post) / March 10, 2022
Long before COVID-19 infected its first human host, people received care in hospital hallways and patients were routinely denied access to life-saving drugs
Friday marks two years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In this time, one would hope we’ve learned a few lessons about health care. As home to some of the Western world’s longest lockdown measures, which had devastating impacts on many Canadians’ finances, mental and physical health, education and social ties, it should be clear that big change is necessary.
I’m not talking about adding a few extra hospital beds here, or a top-up of nurses’ salaries there, but a fundamental shift in how this country approaches health care. Our system has proven so broken, so inherently incapable of functioning at a basic level, that its very core must be re-evaluated. A bandage will not suffice — Canadian health care needs an ideological transplant.
The driving ideology of Canadian health care has been that it must be universal, egalitarian and wholly publicly financed. There’s a big problem, though: these ideals have been confused with our reality.
Many Canadians are convinced we actually offer universal, egalitarian, and wholly publicly financed health care when, in fact, we do not. They believe this because progressive politicians have told them we do, in order to use the topic as a wedge issue and paint anyone who questions the system as a heartless, money-hungry ogre who wants to take away what Canadians hold most dear.
