Well said

Janet Bagnall challenges the patently false claim that Canada can't afford an effective public health care system:

Governments of various leanings have for years been plastering the word "unsustainable" all over our health care system. Hospital costs? Impossible to maintain. Doctors' salaries? Unaffordable. Pharmaceutical costs? Spiralling out of control. Canadians' expectations? Totally unrealistic.

Intentionally or not, it's been a masterful propaganda operation. But that doesn't make it any truer. Canadians know the health-care system they rightly view as a defining Canadian characteristic is worth saving. This week, a poll showed that 61 per cent of Canadians want the healthcare system to be improved through greater efficiencies; 28 per cent want more taxes to be spent on health care even if that means cutting other public services; and only 11 per cent think rising healthcare costs should be handled privately.

If after all these years, barely one in 10 Canadians think paying more out of their own pockets is the only way to improve the health-care system, it goes to show how ineffective the campaign undermining a publicly funded, equitable health-care system has been.
...
Medicare spending eats up roughly the same proportion of provincial revenues as it did 20 years ago, Evans told the MPs. "The problem isn't uncontrolled public healthcare spending," Evans said, according to a statement. "It's uncontrolled private health spending combined with a drop in provincial revenues created by large tax cuts over the years."

Publicly funded costs might look like they have increased, but that's because federal and provincial governments went on a massive tax-cutting mission between 1997 and 2004, resulting in the loss of $170.8 billion from public-sector revenues, according to Evans. With the public revenue pie smaller - $35 billion a year smaller at the provincial level - of course the share consumed by public health care spending looked like it was bigger.