HEALTH CARE: SIMPLE SOLUTIONS NO ONE WANTS TO IMPLEMENT

• Soaring health care costs, driven by astronomical salaries paid to senior medical practitioners by competing private health-care providers in the US
• Disproportionally high usage of the health care system by Canada’s exploding immigrant population
• Ageing population needing more health services

The answer of US-worshipping Canadian neocons is two-tier health care. Why, cries John Tory, the new leader of the hapless Ontario Conservative party, shouldn’t Canadians have “choice” in their health care services? This is classic conservative re-framing of public debate. “Choice” in health care means choice for those who can afford it, which means doctors who want to make obscene amounts of money (including many of the best ones) would work for the higher-paying private-tier system and the rest of us would be stuck with long waits and second-class service, just like we face in every other private sector of the economy.

Fortunately, and to the chagrin of the Canadian neocons, the vast majority of Canadian’s aren’t buying this Orwellian deceit. Recent polls say support for a public, single-class health care system is as high as ever.

So what’s a civilized country to do to deal with the three great challenges of 21st century health care bulleted above? I recently listened to a talk show featuring the federal Minister of Health, discussing how these problems should be solved. Caller after caller said the same two things:

1. Much of the work done by doctors should be transferred to paraprofessionals and to self-diagnosis and self-treatment. Much more information, expert systems and self-service equipment needs to be provided to enable this. [I spoke to two doctors who said they would love to do this, since the majority of the work they do does not require a licensed professional to do it competently — but that the lawyers wouldn’t let them do it.]
2. There needs to be a massive shift in the health care system from treatment to preventative care.

When the moderator asked the Minister whether he had learned anything from these recurring messages, he ‘summarized’ the discussion by saying that better measurement systems were needed to ensure hospitals were operating as efficiently as possible, and that the government was looking into ways to do public-private partnerships without allowing competition or giving up control over pricing and access. The interviewer was incredulous: Had the Minister not heard the two messages that the public had been bombarding him with for the past hour? Of course these things would be considered, he replied, but the first priority was to find ways to increase access without increasing cost. His deafness to these two obvious solutions to the malaise of the system was astonishing.

What one listener of this talk show said about neoncons’ true motivation for wanting two-tier health care was also telling: “The reason rich politicians want a two class system is that they’re embarrassed to have to wait in line for health services the same as ‘ordinary’ Canadians, when their US business colleagues can jump the queue so easily and have their company write off the extra cost as a business expense. They’re also embarrassed that, to jump the queue, they have to fly to the US and pay out of their own pocket”. So in fact there is a choice for the very rich to jump the queue: Pay for treatment in the private US system.

Is Canada’s health care system the best in the world? Far from it. Health care in Canada’s cities is much better than in rural areas. The bureaucracy in much of the system (notably the blood collection system and the ‘walk-in’ clinics) is suffocating, and needlessly so. And because of its zeal to protect jobs in the system, Canada, which ranks first in the world in per-capita patents of medical technology, ranks forty-first in the world in the use of modern medical technology in its hospitals (MRI equipment is as scarce as gold, for example).

But it’s still an excellent system, and one that a two-class health care system won’t improve, at least for 95% of the population. If only the politicians and bureaucrats only had the intelligence and vision to listen to the Wisdom of Crowds and make the two changes (more paraprofessional/self-care, and more prevention instead of treatment) that the public is already starting to make themselves, our system would be the best in the world.

Oh — a word about prescription drug costs: You may have heard that many Americans come up to Canada to buy prescription drugs much cheaper than they can buy them in the US. Now, US municipal and state governments are fighting for the right to buy their drugs from Canada, too (and Kerry wants them to have this right). The funny thing is, the companies selling them are essentially all the same companies, since the Canadian pharmaceutical industry is dominated by the same handful of global corporations as the US industry. Why do these companies charge more in the US than the rest of the world for the same drugs? Not, as the neocons and the pharma industry are telling Americans, because Canadian drugs are inferior (perhaps, it is implied, dangerously so) — they are the identical drugs. They sell them for higher prices in the US because they can. Drug companies charge as much as the market will bear, and in the bloated US health care system where if you have enough money you can buy anything, the market will bear a lot. In the rest of the world money available for drugs is much less, so to sell their products pharma companies lower prices by 30, 50, even 70%, and still make a good margin. This is a case where globalization threatens to backfire on some of the corporations that most benefit from it. Couldn’t happen to a nice bunch of guys.