ddk wrote:I will never understand the thinking behind fighting against free healthcare for all citizens of a nation. It's just bizarre to me that people would not only want to prevent access to it for others but also for their friends, family and themselves. It truly boggles my mind.
As others have pointed out, health care is far, far, far from free. The question for societies to answer is how it is paid for.
Here is a link to the budget for the province of Ontario (population 13 million) few years and for this coming year.
http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/budget/onta ... #ch2_t2-24 (this is from the government's own website.)
Have a look at the heath care line -- $44 billion in 2010/2011, and almost $49 billion in 2013/2014 -- an increase of $5 billion in three years, and that is projected to continue to grow much faster than inflation. As I've pointed out earlier, scaled up to the population of the US, that's over $1 trillion per year.
Health care dwarfs all other government expenditures; it's twice the elementary school / secondary school education budget. The other provinces have similar budgets in terms of break-down, although not as large as Ontario's owing to their smaller populations.
...and heath care is not entirely free to the individual either, although between government coverage and employer benefits, topped up with some private insurance, few Canadians are out of pocket for very much. Unemployed people, however, have only the government coverage, and thus have access to basic care at no cost, however they will be out of pocket for procedures considered elective -- which pretty much means anything non-critical, as well as almost all dental and optical. These latter services are almost always covered by employer benefits and private insurance.
Let me give you some hypothetical situations to explain what the Canadian system is like.
Scenario 1: You have a heart attack. Assuming you are in an urban area, paramedics will arrive in minutes, and take you to the nearest hospital. You'll be admitted to emergency, and treated according to your condition. If you need by-pass surgery or a stent, you'll be scheduled for surgery according to your condition. You may wait a couple of weeks or months. Only if you are truly in dire condition will you receive your surgery immediately or within days. Cost to you: $0, but you may wait a while.
Scenario 2: You tear a tendon in your knee skiing. You may be taken to ambulance to a nearby hospital, admitted to emergency and may wait a couple of minutes or hours depending on how busy they are. You may receive a fiberglass cast, and be discharged. Cost to you: $0. However follow-up physiotherapy is usually not covered by the government. You'll need employer benefits or private insurance to cover that. Cost to you: hundreds of $ unless you have your own insurance.
Scenario 3: You need a root canal. The province will cover the cost of extracting the tooth entirely, but if you want a proper root canal by an endodontist, you'll need to pay directly, and even then employer benefits usually cover half the cost. Same with the crown. Cost to you: over a thousand unless you have your own insurance, in which case you're still paying hundreds.
The Canadian system designed to ensure everyone has basic health care -- basic meaning the level of heath care that can keep you relatively healthy and alive. There's a LOT of health care options out there that are not covered that are being paid for by employers and individuals above and beyond the almost $50 billion the province is paying.
At the risk of igniting another debate on capitalism vs. socialism, Canada has a capitalism driven economy (we have far, far fewer state controlled "Crown corporations" than 30 years ago -- most of them have been privatized) but our governments provide a significant amount of social support paid for through taxes. This only works if a society can accomplish two things:
1) Create a environment in which private business succeed and consumers spend, so that significant taxes (sales and income taxes being the largest) can be collected without harming the economic engines that create wealth. This is the capitalist part.
2) Design the social programs to protect themselves from abuse and over-use by the citizens themselves. Socialism works if people take out of the system the minimum they require of it -- when everyone pulls as much as they possibly can from the system, it will collapse. Does this mean heath care in Canada is rationed according to need? Absolutely. It must for the system to not collapse. This is why I had to go to my GP first in order to schedule a sleep study. He, not I, determined I needed the service, at which point the government covered the cost of the study. Had I gone straight to the sleep clinic, I would have had to pay out of pocket.
Going back to an earlier post of mine, Canadians have a slightly different relationship with our government than our friends south of the border. We tend to be more accepting of our government rationing of heath care. Do we like it? No. Do we live with it? Yes. Are we socialists? Not exactly. A large percentage of the population do proudly call themselves socialists, but we have an even larger percentage that are conservative, even libertarian. We currently have a very conservative federal government (in fact they are called the Conservative Party of Canada) yet at the provincial levels the same citizens who elected them elect liberal (in the case of Ontario) and even socialist (New Democratic Party) governments. We have a dual capitalist / socialist society that's hard to explain unless you spend some time here.
