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Let’s have medicare, Bernie-style

November 3, 2017   ·   0 Comments

VERMONT SENATOR Bernie Sanders certainly found himself preaching to the converted when he spoke last Sunday to a sold-out crowd at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall.

His subject, not surprisingly, was his proposed legislation titled Medicare for All.

Nearly half a century has passed since the concept of government-funded universal health care became a reality in Canada, and longer still since similar plans were created in Britain and continental Europe.

However, what the challenger for Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy has in mind today goes well beyond what we now have in Canada, and should become a topic before the next federal election campaign.

As every Canadian knows or should know, our current form of “medicare for all” includes the normal costs associated with both the monitoring of our health by qualified physicians and the basic costs stemming from surgery, other forms of treatment and hospitalization.

But unlike the concept being advanced by Senator Sanders, our medicare system doesn’t extend to other potentially expensive forms of health care, including prescription drugs, dental care and physiotherapy. For protection against these, we either pay for them ourselves or purchase U.S.-style private insurance.

For those who missed it, there was an interesting critique of the Sanders speech in Tuesday’s Globe and Mail by health reporter Andre Picard.

Suggesting at the outset that there’s “nothing like looking south to make Canadians feel good about their health system,” Mr. Picard said that while our system is far better than the “non-system” in the U.S., we still have a way to go.

Noting that before his talk, the senator had toured three hospitals in downtown Toronto – Women’s College Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital and the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre at Toronto General Hospital – “and dutifully noted that the care is superb and that, unlike comparable U.S. institutions, they have minuscule billing offices.”

But while the three were arguably, among  the best health-care facilities in the country, “when you stray a bit outside downtown Toronto, the inadequacies become a lot more glaring and real, and quickly.”

And while the senator had denounced the “intentional lies and distortions” about Canadian health care that are commonplace in U.S. political circles, he had glossed over obvious shortcomings of the Canadian system, such as wait times, overcrowding and the challenges of delivering care outside big urban centres, issuing only mild rebukes over our lack of universal pharmacare and dental coverage.

“Perhaps Mr. Sanders was just being a polite visitor, but we would have all benefited from a more robust discussion of the ‘Medicare for All’ plan, because it is, in fact, far more comprehensive than what exists in Canada currently”  by including “prescription drugs, home care, vision care, dental care, rehab, psychological care and more.”

It will be interesting to see whether the senator’s crusade will lead to U.S. Democrats doing more than defend Obamacare, by actually making universal medicare part of the party’s platform in the 2018 mid-term Congressional elections.

Meanwhile, let’s hope some of our politicians start to look seriously at extending our medicare system, even if only incrementally.

For example, why not gradually extend the prescription drug coverage available to seniors to progressively lower age groups? The cost to the taxpayer of a full “pharmacare” program could be minimized by having higher “copayments” than the $100 annually and $6.11 per prescription beyond the $100.

As we see it, a requirement to pay just the first $500 of annual prescription drug purchases would be vastly preferable to having no protection against illnesses that require costly medications.


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