Canada's Public Health System

Choice #2 : “Canada’s public health system, like all other such socialistic systems, is a colossal failure. Governments cannot be trusted to make a fair and efficient health system. We should privatize the medical care system and let private enterprise and competition do the job properly.”

Canada is without a doubt a progressive, left of center, country which has a wide array of public services in addition to owning Crown corporations. The statement made above seems to put into question the decision to include healthcare in these government-run services by questioning its fairness and efficiency as well as proposing a potential takeover by the private sector. Just like many other political debates falls within the realm of the traditional “left-right” political spectrum which originated in the French Revolutionary era. In this framework, the “Right” represented royal and religious interests while the “Left” represented mostly civil liberties. A more modern representation of this spectrum, such as the Nolan chart which was developed in 1970 shows the “Left” as libertarian and the “Right” as conservative. This would place the statement above as a critique of the left by a conservative, pro free-market economic viewpoint. The following will refute this viewpoint by providing the benefits of a public healthcare system as well as the potential drawbacks of its privatization.

First and foremost although we now have established the opposite political views that fuel the healthcare debate, it is important to know exact definition of both public and private healthcare especially from a purely Canadian viewpoint. According to a December 2006 article by CBC news public healthcare: “… it's either what defines Canada