Don’t be fooled Canada loves its Universal Healthcare System, August 5, 2009

A Group of People Gathered on the Stage

Over the past twelve months of what some pundits are calling the ‘new economic order, Canadians have been following with great interest the increased amount of attention they are receiving in America’s mainstream media.  The first wave of coverage came around Canadian banks and how solid they are, an acknowledgment (albeit editorial) that Canada’s more reserved approach to lending, speculation and the markets, in general, has held it in good stead.  The latest wave of media attention is around President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the healthcare system, leading both sides of the debate to use comparisons to support their arguments.  Testimonials from various countries, but particularly from Canada, have been used either to support universal healthcare as a highly-valued right of citizenship or- on the other side of the coin – to expose it as a bureaucratic maze leading to long waiting periods for medical care and, when it is finally received, substandard levels of practice.

Most Canadians would freely acknowledge that the level of healthcare in the United States, for those who can afford it, is at times superior to that available in Canada, and many wealthy Canadians don’t hesitate to visit doctors at the Mayo Clinic or one of the outstanding hospitals in  New York City or Cleveland for their various ailments.  These same Canadians are shocked, however, when they learn that 50 million Americans have no health care at all, a number that represents 20 million more people than the entire population of their country.  While it is accurate that Canada is grappling with unacceptably long waiting periods in some areas of the country, for the most part, Canadians are still extremely happy with their health care system.  Three years ago, Canada’s state-owned national broadcaster, the CBC, held a national contest for Canadians to vote on their most noteworthy citizen, the individual to carry the title of “the Greatest Canadian”.  To no one’s particular surprise, the winner that emerged from the widely-followed national competition was not a renowned former Prime Minister like Pierre Trudeau or a famous singer such as Céline Dion, but rather a politician from the prairie province of Saskatchewan who introduced Medicare, the national health-care system, to all Canadians.  Since this milestone accomplishment in the early 1960s, most Canadians have come to view free state-run healthcare as a basic right of citizenship, and immigrants who are polled on their reasons for choosing Canada as a destination will often refer to this advantage as one of the motivations behind their choice.

Filmmaker and author Michael Moore, along with many other social commentators, has used the art of comparison with other industrialized countries to make the point to his fellow Americans that the United States is the odd-man-out in this area, with right-wing politicians seeing national healthcare as another nail in the coffin of capitalism and the free-market system.  Recently, critics of the proposed Obama healthcare overhaul have gone so far as to seek out Canadians who are willing to talk about the failures of their system, and how waiting periods in Canada would have led to their untimely demise had they not been able to tap into the “far-superior” American system.  Viewed from the perspective of most Canadians, this is one of the most aggressive spins to date from opponents to universal healthcare in the United States.  Put simply, these people want Americans to believe that their northern neighbors view universal healthcare as an abject failure. Do Canadians recognize that there are some problems with wait times and other issues within their healthcare system?  The answer is unequivocal ‘yes, but no one in Canada would want to revert to the pre-Tommy Douglas days when there was no universal system, such as is the case in the United States at the present time.  Canadians have furthermore become quite attuned to seeing other countries brought into internal political debates in America, so this aspect of the issue is not surprising to anyone.  What does annoy some people, however, is to see what those living north of the 49th parallel view as one of their most successful social experiments criticized by individuals who are presenting this as though Canadians themselves are dissatisfied with their own system. Because some Americans don’t want a universal healthcare system, those who have one – such as Canada – must be cast as failures in order to add credibility to their own belief system.  A poll released this week confirms that the majority of Canadians continue to view Medicare as an extremely positive attribute of living in Canada.

Canada is farther to the left in the political spectrum than the United States and always has been.  Universal healthcare is part of this overall belief system that the state has an important role to play in providing certain services and rights to ALL of its citizens, even if taxation is higher as a result.  Some American lobby groups may think that finding disgruntled Canadians to complain about their healthcare system in Canada will fool citizens of the United States into thinking that the system is bad.  They will be unsuccessful in the long run because most Canadians treasure their system and even go so far as to recognize the father of Medicare as one of their greatest sons.

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