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The system has been a Swiss cheese and a fraud for decades

In 2012, the British Columbia Medical Services Commission acknowledged what was widely known, that for 16 years, it has been allowing patients to spend their own funds to escape the lengthening public queues and go to private clinics. The system has been a Swiss cheese and a fraud for decades, rationing health service as Canada became less and less competitive in doctors per thousand of population, and trying to stifle, while in fact indulging private medicine. Almost all the while, Canadians have preened themselves that they had a better health-care system than the United States; (for the lower economic third of the population, but not for the rest). B.C.’s Medical Services Commission asked Cambie Surgeries Centre to reject applications for earlier treatment than the public service could provide, even after the Chaouilli decision. In the present case, Day and others are challenging the prohibition against patients using their own funds for medical care, and the ban on private health insurance generally as well as the ban on doctors acting in both the private and public health fields.

Photo by Darryl Dyck/CP

Naturally, the B.C. government is swaddling itself in the usual socialist claptrap that it is the champion of equal treatment, even though the Supreme Court determined in the Chaouilli case that Canadians were suffering and dying on the waiting lists that were steadily accumulating. The precise argument of Day and his clinic is that British Columbia is violating the rights to life, liberty, and security of the person under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and that because patients are compelled to wait their turn, they should have the right to private-sector medicine. They seek to vacate the provisions of the B.C. Medicare Protection Act prohibition on private insurance, the limits to extra billing, and the ban on dual practice by the medical profession. The government replies that admitting the complainant’s objectives will damage the spavined beast of the provincial health-care system. They will cling to the crumbling ramparts of the argument that there is no connection between the B.C. discouragement of private payment and the alleged deprivation of life, liberty and security. They naturally claim that overturning the existing law will change health care from a basis of need to one of wealth. And they claim that as physicians move from the public to the private sphere, it will force an increase in public health costs.