Canadian election

[Skandranon]

Harper: "Why does it matter where the Canadian people are getting their health care from, as long as they're getting it..."  Thinly veiled by the mask of "innovation", I think we all know what that really means.

I think we all think we know what that really means, and are getting it all wrong. I'm tired of the knee-jerk response to whenever he talks about private delivery of public services and the suspicion that it's going to lead to two tier health care. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about provincial governments, being physically unable to provide services in good time, contracting private health care providers to provide the services that they can't. That's not two tier health care - that's one tier. Two tier health care means that the private citizen can pay with his or her own money to get care, and that's not the case - these public contractors will be paid from public money and as accessible to everyone as public services, since they're both paid from the same source. You will be no more able to "pull out the credit card" for private providers than you will be to do so for public providers. They'll both be paid out of public insurance - so there will be no, none, absolutely no difference in accessibility. Yes, private services will probably cost more, but we're not looking for efficiency so much as being able to reduce waiting times, and increasing the available pool of services is a good way to do that.

The argument goes that the existence of private providers will eventually lead to a two-tier system. That's a logically fallacious slippery-slope argument. That said, there's already a "stealth" two-tier system in place, with numerous private clinics offering advanced services. Paul Martin likes to pretend it doesn't exist so he doesn't have to do anything about it. That's the real threat to one-tier health care. If you hate anything with the word "private" involved, go with Jack Layton, who wants to make any private delivery of health care illegal.