Recognizing the cure

Gordon Guyatt of the Medical Reform Group criticizes the CMA for refusing to consider the best option in dealing with health care:

Last month, the Canadian Medical Association presented the public with four choices regarding the future of Canadian medical care. Their options include the status quo and three progressively more extreme moves toward privatization.

Unfortunately, they left out the fifth, best choice — strengthening publicly funded health care, delivered by not-for-profit providers...

The position paper released last month, the CMA's next step, has major limitations. The first problem is that it endorses the myth that publicly funded health care is unsustainable...In the past 15 years, publicly funded health care has grown parallel with the rest of the economy. In a picture that differs from almost every other developed country, Canadian public spending on health care as a proportion of the GDP remains at the same level as in 1992, under 7.5 per cent.

Second, in setting up its four options, the CMA neglected the choice made by the three key health-care reports of the past decade: the National Health Forum of 1997, the Romanow commission, and the study by Senator Michael Kirby.

All recommended a strengthening of publicly funded health care, with national home-care and pharmacare programs.

Kudos to Guyatt for highlighting the all-too-often neglected facts showing that the public system is both completely sustainable, and the best option to ensure high-quality care for all Canadians in the long term. Hopefully between Guyatt's group and the Canadian Doctors for Medicare which formed earlier this year, there will be enough internal pressure to push the CMA to itself recognize those factors in making future decisions.