Prime Minister Kim Campbell, while her Progressive Conservative Party of Canada was burning down around her, famously said you can’t discuss Canada’s social support network via sound bites during a 42-day election campaign.
With health care largely off the table during this current campaign, and with a majority of our provinces thinking about elections this fall, that leaves the field entirely open to the rest of us.
A new think tank project, the Canadian Alliance for Sustainable Health Care, has gotten $1.6 million from the country’s largest banks, insurance companies and other large corporations. Its activity is to be formally unveiled next month by the Conference Board of Canada, according to the Globe and Mail.
With politicians deliberately keeping themselves out of the picture, now might be a good time to set the terms of a debate about the future of our cherished national health program.
But if the debate is going to be led from a corporate perspective, these terms should include health care as a social good, and not just a business expense.
Even before the alliance has begun its work, doom and gloom scenarios were being trotted out and used to frame the discussion.
The numbers are not unfamiliar. Canadians spent $191.6 billion on health care last year, up from $171.9 billion in 2008. The provincial budgetary allocations for health care took up 8.4 per cent of our GDP, last year compared with 5.4 per cent in 1975.
In Ontario alone, health care costs are expected to take up to 80 per cent of the provincial budget in that mythical era known as 2030 — when most of today’s big corporate decision makers will either be in long-term care themselves, or their graves.
If that’s all this new discussion will be about — the costs — then, just like our politicians, our corporate leaders will be wasting our time.
Health care will cost what it costs, no matter whose pocket the money comes from. We can decide to share the costs as fairly and equitably as we can, or we can decide that sick people are on their own, and should take out loans to pay for their care themselves.
Because we can’t simply will the costs themselves to drop, can we?
No one is suggesting a dark “corporate agenda” for rationed health care, but we need to understand that we are discussing how costs will be shared through society, not deciding who will be denied care.
Still, lest we just conclude that corporate leaders are a bunch of cold-hearted bean counters, remember that almost every hospital in Canada contains staff and equipment provided by business, and that business leaders sit on our hospital boards.
Bill Holland is executive chairman of a mutual fund company, who has donated $46 million himself to hospitals. He says the medical system “is a total and utter mess.”
He’s entitled to his view. Besides, how much money have you given to your local hospital?
We’re entitled to talk about how health care ought to be paid for. If people can find a way to make it cost less, they should be heard.
We’re not entitled to say that we built a first-class health system with public money, and then set up another system to deny care.
So, let’s talk — while it’s still safe to do so.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.