Canadian election

[ShadowHM]

There seems to be misunderstanding all over on the issues involved with publicly funded health care.

We Canadians like to vote with knee-jerk promptness every time certain spectres are raised.

We fear a two tier system, wherein the rich can get services while the poor cannot - where the rich can 'jump the queue'. But a two tier system is not the same thing as a system where there are services offered for profit. We (in general) seem to equate the two, and you certainly seem to do so.

Most of the front line health care we already get is via the private sector. There are very few salaried physicians in this country. Most are paid on a 'fee for service' basis, and they do indeed do so with the expectation of personal profit. In fact, that profit is their income. Those fees are, in Ontario, paid by the province. And that is the criteria that I think Skandranon is applying. Who pays?

Furthermore, there are all manner of other services that are offered by the private sector to private citizens or to hospitals and paid for by the province. This is not a bad thing. I am perplexed by the knee jerk responses I see to this topic. There is, to be blunt, a certain amount of bureaucratic cost involved in virtually all forms of publicly (government) administered services. There are all kinds of ways and means in which the private sector can and should be involved.

I also take exception to your phrasing here:

Shrouding themselves in the mantle of necessity allows the Conservative turn to private services to appear pragmatic when in reality it reflects the rhetoric of "inevitability" that has robbed us of our effective public health care system in the first place.

Shrouding themselves in the mantle of necessity? That necessity is, as I explained in an earlier post in this thread, a product of 'ambulance thinking' as opposed to 'preventative medicine' thinking. If we don't change our paradigms of heath care, it will be necessary to make hard choices.