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Hitchhiker
Rear Admiral
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 3514
Location: Ontario, Canada
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 Thu Jun 09, 2005 8:56 pm Health-care ruling called 'stinging indictment' |
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| CBC.ca wrote: | Health-care ruling called 'stinging indictment'
Last Updated Thu, 09 Jun 2005 21:34:56 EDT
CBC News
Some of the country's largest medical groups call Thursday's Supreme Court of Canada ruling allowing private health insurance in Quebec a "historic" decision, but Prime Minister Paul Martin is downplaying its significance.
In a 4-3 decision, the country's top court said Quebec patients should be allowed to buy insurance to cover medical treatments already provided by medicare, citing the physical and psychological suffering caused by long waits for services in the publicly funded system.
The most likely services to be covered by such insurance plans would be diagnostic tests and elective procedures such as cataract and joint-replacement surgery, analysts have said.
Canadian Medical Association president Albert Schumacher said the ruling "could substantially change the very foundations of medicare as we know it."
Schumacher's association, representing about 60,000 doctors, medical residents and medical students, acted as an intervenor in the case, which has been winding through the legal system for about seven years.
He called the ruling "a stinging indictment of the failure of government to respond to the needs in the health-care system...
"Every day in the system, patients and their families experience excessive waiting times � waiting times that threaten the health of patients and the very viability of medicare," he said.
But federal politicians insisted Canada's publicly funded medicare system is safe despite the ruling.
"We're not going to have a two-tier health-care system in this country. Nobody wants that," Martin told reporters in Ottawa. "What we want to do is to strengthen the public health-care system."
His government is doing that by committing $41 billion to health care improvements across Canada over the next 10 years, the prime minister said.
Federal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler also said the ruling does not jeopardize medicare.
"On a first quick reading, the importance, the validity and the integrity of the public health-care system has been reaffirmed," he said as he left a cabinet meeting in Ottawa.
'The end of medicare as we know it'
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation applauded the Supreme Court's decision, saying it will encourage people in other provinces to challenge similar laws banning private health-care insurance in their own jurisdictions.
"This is the end of medicare as we know it," said the federation's John Williamson. "This is a breach in government monopoly health care in this country."
He said the ruling acknowledges that Canadians are dying because they are waiting too long for medical care, and points out that waiting times are much shorter in many European countries where a private system operates side by side with a public system.
"This is one small step for patient care, one giant leap for health-care reform," Williamson said of the decision.
Provincial acts called 'clones' of Canada Health Act
Sharon Sholzberg-Gray of the Canadian Healthcare Association agrees that the ruling will open the door to litigation in other provinces.
"It's a decision that applies to the Quebec act, but clearly it's a clone of all the other provincial acts, and they're all clones of the Canada Health Act," she said.
The Canadian Healthcare Association is an umbrella group acts as an advocate for a wide variety of hospital, medical and health-care organizations across Canada.
Sholzberg-Gray added that there's no fear of the entire Quebec medical system going to a private-payment plan, despite the ruling.
"Just because someone might be able to pay $8,000 for a joint replacement doesn't mean all Canadians can pay $300,000 for a complex cancer treatment," she said.
"If you have breast cancer and you need Herceptin, [a drug] which costs $40,000 a year, I'm not sure anyone is going to sell you insurance that costs $5,000 a year."
Private clinics predicted for simple procedures
She said she could not see private interests setting up separate cancer treatment or heart surgery centres in Quebec, because the astronomical cost would be beyond the means of all but a few patients.
However, she predicted clinics would crop up to treat relatively simple and common health problems such as joint replacements, as well as offer an array of diagnostic tests for which Quebecers must now wait.
A profit can be made from that kind of private operation, said Sholzberg-Gray.
She could see a future in which patients "have a foot in both systems," paying a couple of hundred dollars for a diagnostic test and then going to the public system for the expensive treatment.
The Canadian Labour Congress, another intervenor in the Supreme Court case, was disappointed by the ruling in favour of allowing some private health-care delivery.
"For Canadian workers, the Canadian medicare system is an enormous benefit. It is one they had hoped the courts would recognize as a right," said Steven Shrybman, a lawyer acting for the group representing three million unionized workers in the country.
"Unfortunately, the court did not do that."
Copyright �2005 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - All Rights Reserved |
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/06/09/medical-ruling-reaction050609.html
This is an issue of hot debate. I'm a firm believer in universal healthcare, and that this guy truly is our greatest Canadian.
I do recognize that the system doesn't work as it is now, and that it does need serious reform. I just don't think that a two-tiered system would work--it would be more inefficient then what we have now. . . .
Could this moreover be, oh my, judicial activism?! Has the Supreme Court overstepped its judicial authority in the legislative process? These are the questions people are asking now; so "judicial activism" appears to be another subject of debate not just in the United States, but Canada as well.
I think that as long as they haven't gone so far as to rule that we must have a two-tiered system, just that we are allowed to seek private insurance, then it's fine, it just gives us more choices. I hope, however, that the government takes steps to shore up healthcare before things get worse.
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Alucard
Vampire
Joined: 06 Nov 2004
Posts: 2780
Location: Caaaaaanada
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| Fri Jun 10, 2005 6:14 am |
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I still don't understand why they picked only Quebec... There are 9 other provinces and 3 Territories out there.
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Hitchhiker
Rear Admiral
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 3514
Location: Ontario, Canada
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| Fri Jun 10, 2005 7:24 am |
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| mad_d0ggie wrote: | | I still don't understand why they picked only Quebec... There are 9 other provinces and 3 Territories out there. |
They only ruled against Quebec because they only had the jurisdiction to do so.
This article might also help. You see, a man needed hip replacement surgery and wanted to buy private insurance so he could get private surgery rather than wait in the public care system. Unfortunately, he learned that private insurance was not legal in Quebec--and took the government to court. The other plaintiff was a doctor who wanted to open a private clinic.
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