Last week the Supreme Court handed the reformers of Health Care a big stick to go along with their soft talking. Many have argued in the days following th decision that this big stick should be set aside as reforms can happen as long as everyone knows that the stick lingers somewhere in the background. In today's National Post Lorne Gunter calls this argument rubbish.
It's a myth that public care is chronically underfunded. Canadian governments are now
spending nearly $800 per citizen more that they were a decade ago - nearly $80-billion per
year for 32 million Canadians. Ontario alone devotes nearly 46% of its entire provincial budget to health care, up a quarter from 1985. And still the public system grinds slower each year.
The problem is not that we have the wrong public-only system. The problem is we have a public-only system. Period.
The editorial in Saturday's Kitchener Record talked about how we needed to protect the integrity of the public-only health care system and that our governments should invoke the notwithstanding clause to do so. They reasoned that the a two-tier system would destroy the health care system. One should remember one thing. The Supreme Court of Canada heard all of these argument. They spent a full year to make their decision after the evidentiary stage was completed. Rest assured that they heard every argument in favour of public-only. They concluded that a lifting of the prohibition would not destroy the health care system. In fact, countries such as the UK and France, who have two-tier systems, spend less money on health care and have shorter waiting times. Leftist newspapers can blather on all they want but their arguments have been weighed and measured by the Supreme Court and found wanting.
