On open-and-shut cases

Larry Brown eviscerates the claim that there's any merit to reopening the debate on private vs. public funding for health care:

(T)he pretence that there hasn't been a debate about the role of the for-profit sector in health care, that Canadians have somehow refused to discuss it, is preposterous.

As one example only, what was the Romanow Report if not the most intensive democratic public debate about health care that we've had since the origin of the Canada Health Act?

We've had the debate, repeatedly. Repeatedly, public non-profit care has been shown to be the overwhelmingly better choice.

It still is, for everyone except those who want to make a profit from this change, or those who believe, as an ideological principle, that profits always trump people.

Of course, the value of those profits is bound to make some eager to retread old ground in search of some new argument in favour of profit-based care - or at least to claim that there's a need to revisit decided issues. But our experience since Romanow reported shows only that the publicly-funded system is more than capable of becoming more efficient...as long as it receives enough resources to do the job. And the more energy we're forced to divert to point out the flaws in the for-profit reasoning, the less is available to enable the current system to become all the better.