It’s about a year since Tim Houston swept to power in Nova Scotia with a bold promise to fix the health-care system. He said doing so would be both expensive and slow. Full points to the premier for his honesty, at least.
His freshman government quickly increased the health-care budget by more than $400 million -- all of it borrowed money -- raising the health budget to $5.7 billion. That’s $5700.00 for every one of the million people in the province. That’s the expensive part. The slow part is evidenced by the fact that all of that money -- and some clever new incentive and retention programmes -- haven’t made things any better.
In fact, in the most readily quantifiable ways, things are worse. More people are without a family doctor than ever before. Emergency rooms are packed to overflowing. People are waiting long hours to see the few doctors working behind the curtains.
It’s the same situation in other provinces, prompting the premiers, in a rare display of unanimity, to demand that Ottawa significantly increase its share of health-care funding. Asking for more money from the federal government is about the only thing the premiers ever agree on.
But there’s good reason to doubt that more gobs of money will fix the system. We already spend about 40 cents of every provincial tax dollar on it. If money is the solution, why is the problem bad and getting worse?
At the risk of slaying the most sacred of Canadian cows, it’s time to look critically and constructively at whether our publicly-funded, supposedly universal system can be fixed without outside money injected through private sector involvement. We can all agree that the notions of universality and public funding are noble and that the most needy in society should not have to pay or wait. But a system that leaves so many without doctors and access to care is not providing an acceptable standard of universal care -- at any price.
