Freedom Socialist • Vol. 21, No. 3 • October-December 2000

DATELINE CANADA

Healthcare privatization is killing us!

BY HARRY PAINE

Healthcare is an issue that crosses all classes and boundaries. A number of polls conducted in various parts of the country show that the right to adequate care when we are sick is the number one concern of the vast majority of Canadians.

In Canada we are mindful of our poor brothers and sisters in the U.S. who do not have a universal national healthcare plan that will pay their hospital and doctor bills. Canadians owe our medical system to the clout and mobilizing power of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the forerunner of the New Democratic Party (NDP), our labour party.

Here, everybody's medical insurance is provided by the government rather than by businesses run for profit. While the administration of the plan is left to the provinces, the federal government supplies the bulk of the funding and mandates that healthcare be universal and single-tiered. That guarantees, in theory, that the same services are available to rich and poor alike.

This is about to change!

A system in crisis. In Alberta, the Conservative Party government has introduced the thin edge of the wedge of privatization.

What's called Bill 11, passed recently in spite of massive opposition from labour and community groups, allows private companies, most of them based in the United States, to set up and operate surgical clinics in competition with public hospitals.

Meanwhile, the governments in the provinces and in the capital, Ottawa, are starving hospitals and other healthcare institutions of the necessary funding to maintain modern technology and an adequate professional staff. Cutbacks have resulted in doctors and nurses migrating to the U.S., long waiting times for surgery, patient beds set up in hospital hallways, and little or no medical personnel in the First Nation communities of the north.

The enormous cost of solving a situation that they have created is causing government to look softly toward privatization as one way to off-load the burden. The background to all of this is the enormous pressure for "open markets" codified in free trade agreements like NAFTA.

Privatization: a death sentence. A recent outbreak of E-coli poisoning in the rural township of Walkerton, Ontario left nine people dead and sickened hundreds more. And it will never be truly known how many apparently natural deaths during the past year the deadly bacteria contributed to.

The National Post, an ultraconservative daily newspaper, printed a column on June 5 called "Private Profit, Poisoned Water," in which Bill Tiele observed that "the privatization of water management services and the slashing of public services across Ontario has led directly" to the E-coli deaths and illnesses in Walkerton. Ninety percent of Ontario's rural population rely on ground water for their water supply, as do rural populations throughout North America. Heavy rains and flooding, part of recent changes in weather patterns, have washed who knows what into the wells.

In its mad rush to slash costs, Ontario's Conservative government stopped testing water for E-coli in 1996 and turned the job over to private labs, many of which are not accredited by the Standards Council of Canada. It was not until people started to die that the whistle was finally blown, even though E-coli had been detected in the Walkerton drinking water two years prior. Canadians are now asking: How many other potential Walkertons are there?

With advances in medicine, Canadians and others are certainly living longer than our predecessors - but are we healthier? World Health Organization statistics show a marked deterioration in the health of Canadian children in recent years. The population is aging, the stress of surviving in a society in which poverty and insecurity are massively increasing is escalating, and diseases are spreading faster.

Capitalism makes us sick, pollutes the environment, pours chemicals on our genetically altered food, inhibits testing for poisons, and forces cutbacks in the funding of healthcare. Capitalism is literally killing us - and we're supposed to pay for the privilege.

Nationalized healthcare: Extend it, don't end it! Commenting on Alberta's foray into privatization of medicine, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said this: "Canada's publicly funded healthcare system relies, for its very existence, on the ability of government to restrict the rights of private investors. It should be government and not business that controls a country's healthcare system."

The Centre goes on to declare, "Canada's most important social policies are designed specifically to exclude market forces in order to achieve certain social goals. It would be ludicrous to expect the market to protect fairness and accessibility over profit."

Right on to that. The answer to Canada's problems is not privatization, but government control over every aspect of healthcare, from dental care to prescription drugs. Take the profits out!

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