Further to the mild tone of optimism in a recent post of mine (with a major reservation), Publius looks to Alberta and describes a dark side:

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This is not talk of freeing the market for health care – perish the radical thought – but allowing private entities to offer care with public funds. The hope is that by contracting out, the services will be delivered more efficiently, while keeping the provincial governments as paymasters. The latter part is suppose to reassure the electorate in some deeply mystical way. Because the government is paying for it, it will be good and humane. Repeat until numb.

Since this is government-run health care by other means, there is little to cheer about. Its main advantage is circumventing the militant health care unions. Its disadvantage is that, in the Left hands, it can be used to discredit further reforms in the direction of the market. Just regulate privately delivered care in such a way as make it even worse than the purely public system, and wait for the Toronto Star – and its sisters across the Dominion – to denounce it as capitalism run amok…

As I’ve often said in this space, Medicare isn’t a government program, it’s a cult…

…Any sort of health care financing scheme will have to rely on the principle of putting a bit in and using as needed, something akin to insurance. The overwhelmingly majority of Canadians can afford private insurance premiums, if they could not the tax base would not exist to support the current system. Like with food and housing, those who could not afford the premiums would be subsidized. Such a system would have its abuses, as any system does, but it will allow the great majority of Canadians access to health care on their own terms, rather than those of the Minister of Health. It would also ensure that even the poor could get quality health care, since they would be just another customer of the hospital or clinic. While such an approach would be logical, it would challenge the sanctity of government delivered care. The Cult of Medicare is not interested in quality health care, it is interested in preserving state health care…

Cult. Quite. We have ministers, not of health but of cults.

Mark
Ottawa