Neglecting the obvious

The Globe and Mail presents a poll showing a pessimistic outlook as to future of Canadian health care. Which in and of itself is fair enough - but wouldn't it behoove the Globe to at least mention the main cause for concern?

A poll released Thursday by the Canadian Medical Association and Ipsos-Reid found that on the one-year anniversary of the plan, 54 per cent of Canadians are less hopeful about the future of health care services in their community than they were in 2004...

Many of those surveyed in Thursday's poll, however, said they did believe that the 2004 first ministers' accord, worth $41-billion, could help rebuild the system. But they did not feel that the federal and provincial governments would live up to the ten-year deadline.

Nowhere does the article bother mentioning the Chaoulli decision...or for that matter the ensuing barrage of "single-payer health care is dead!" alarmism, to which the CMA has contributed extensively. Instead, it sounds from the article as if the new pessimism is purely a question of trust in governments rather than a matter of both a rather significant court decision, and an extended PR campaign to try to make privatization inevitable. (Incidentally, if talk of a multiple-payer system leads to less confidence in health care, that should say a great deal about what people ultimately think of privatization.)

The CMA is right to point out that there's a long way to go in making sure that the health care accord leads to definite results, and to call attention to the urgency of the issue. But it could help matters greatly by not doing so much to undermine the system it claims to want to improve. And any fair report on the CMA's activity should make mention of the contradiction.