PRIVATE HEALTH-INSURANCE FOR CANADIANS ?

What Canadians should learn from the U.S. health care disaster
ARNOLD S. RELMAN

Special to Globe and Mail Update

August 15, 2007 at 6:49 PM EDT

The Canadian Medical Association has recently recommended that private competition be introduced into medicare by allowing physicians to bill patients (or private insurance plans) for services that are covered by medicare, and allowing medicare to purchase covered services from for-profit private facilities.

Those who champion privatization claim these modifications of Canada's publicly funded health-care system would save money, help eliminate waiting times and possibly even improve the quality of care.

Policy-makers need only look to the United States for the evidence such claims have no merit. The U.S. experience shows that private, for-profit medical insurance and investor-owned medical facilities are a bad deal for the public, and that a health-care system that encourages physicians to behave like private entrepreneurs leads to extravagant costs.

Those who would deny this obvious evidence are either blinded by unshakeable faith in market ideology or are biased by their interests in businesses that profit from the privatization of health care.

I have been studying and writing about the consequences of commercialized medical care in the U.S. for many years. My conclusions, summarized in a recent book (A Second Opinion, Public Affairs), are that the high, rapidly rising cost of the U.S. health-care system, its failure to provide insurance coverage for about 15 per cent of U.S. citizens, and the uneven quality and limited accessibility of services it provides to so many more, can all be attributed in substantial degree to the fact that the U.S. has the most commercialized health-care system in the Western world.