Those Fraser Institute studies which Amie posted make for interesting reading. While the Canadian model is held up as the ideal by all the developed industrialized countries, back at the ranch I hear the creaking of a system bloated by excessive costs and too many inefficiencies. I also believe the state has no right prohibiting my access to additional care. In that respect Canada is alone in the world.
Slippery slope for whom? The whole country is on a slipperly slope trying to maintain this one tier plan in light of the ballooning aging population. Even Canada's enormous natural wealth won't be enough to fund that scale of care without some change.
Some food for thought from Amie's Fraser articles:
Canada is alone among developed nations in prohibiting private financing of medically necessary care. All of the other nations maintaining the goal of universal access to insurance allow individuals to seek care on their own terms with their own resources when they desire to do so. Again the reasoning behind introducing such a policy is simple: a public monopoly in health insurance means a more expensive and lower standard of care than would be available in a competitive marketplace.
Canada is clearly in the minority among developed nations who maintain universal approaches to insurance when it comes to cost sharing, private competition in the delivery of publicly funded services, and competition in the financing of services.
Canada’s policy approach is also at odds with those of the top performing universal access health care programs, all of whom employ all three of these policies to the advantage of patients and payers alike. Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, and Switzerland all deliver universal access to care without waiting lists; and all have cost sharing, private competition in the delivery of publicly guaranteed care, and private competition in the financing of medically necessary care. The same goes for Australia, Sweden, and Japan, who deliver the very best outcomes from care among universal access nations in the developed world.
Of course, proponents of the status quo continue to raise fears of the “Americanization” of Canada’s health care in response to these policy choices. That’s simply not the case: none of these policies would require abandoning Canada’s universal approach to health care. Rather, implementing these policies would allow Canada’s provinces to do a better job at delivering on the promise of universal access to high quality care in a timely fashion regardless of ability to pay.
One other item of note which is sadly confirmed yet again in these articles is that our good friends down south are out of step with the rest of the developed world by not providing some form of universal health plan.
