Single Payer Health Care: Canadian Style

Canadian health care is a single payer system much like what the US Congress is now debating over. Though the president himself has been coy about his true intentions, most realize that if the democrats win in the health care debate we will end up with a single payer system.

"I have not said that I was a single payer supporter."
-- President Obama, at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire this week.

"I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care plan."
-- Obama, at a Senate campaign rally in 2003.

Filmmaker Michael Moore discusses health care reform in the current issue of Rolling Stone:

"If a true public option is enacted -- and Obama knows this -- it will eventually bring about a single payer system, because the profit-making insurance companies won't be able to compete with a government run plan and make the profits they want to make....I probably shouldn't be saying this, but I'm counting on the fact that Republicans won't be reading this Rolling Stone."


So what shape is Canada's health care system in? An untold number of people die each year in Ontario, because the death panel or Canadian Therapeutic Products Directorate, refuses to make life-saving drugs and equipment available. However, Canadians are not giving up the fight for access to life saving treatment and drugs. Since it is illegal to transport pharmaceuticals across the border, Canadians have turned to the courts. In fact battles have raged across Canada for years, challenging the bureaucratic claim that cost, not saving lives is the critical element in determining access to life saving treatment and medication.

Last year, the reform process was dealt a serious blow when reform crusader Jim Connors died of colorectal cancer. A wealthy man who paid for his own treatment, Connors had been battling the government of Nova Scotia, over its refusal to provide coverage for the cancer drug, Avastin. Since private insurance is illegal in Canada and the single payer system refused to include the drug in its insurance program, citizens had to pay $35,000 per year on this medication. What Mr Connors rightly pointed out, yet President Obama fails to understand, is that a public insurance program does not hurt the most wealthy, it actually threatens the health of the middle class.