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If Canada follows the Australian model, not only would high-income Canadians receive better health care than everyone else, the government would pay for it.

It turns out private-pay patients didn’t take pressure off the public system. As overall use of health-care services went up, so did the need for public resources. Most worrisome is that increased private access to care didn’t really have the desired effect on wait times. Wait times did go down for non-urgent cases, but went up for urgent cases. That means people waiting for life-saving treatments for cancer or a heart attack might have been waiting longer and getting sicker.

The reasons for this outcome point to the profit motive of the private-insurance industry. Private hospitals in Australia generally don’t have either emergency departments or facilities for many complex procedures or intensive care units. These services tend to be expensive and patients that need them are sick — they can’t (and don’t) wait for care. Private hospitals perform less-acute, financially lucrative services that skim profits from the public health-care system. Private insurers are off the hook for expensive treatments, even if they are the result of a complication from a privately performed procedure.

In 2015, the Australian government launched a public consultation with the intent to overhaul private health care.

It isn’t working in Australia, and there is no any reason to believe it would work in Canada. Moreover, what Day is proposing is a system that doesn’t actually exist in Australia or the other models that he claims as examples for Canada to emulate.

Instead, we should take this opportunity to reaffirm the values of equity and fairness in Canadian Medicare and to invest in its future.

Dr. Aruna Dhara is a family physician at Sipekne’katik Health Centre in Nova Scotia. She is currently on sabbatical in Melbourne, Australia, working in primary care.