Thursday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your amusement.

- Dr. Robert Evans nicely demolishes the argument for privatized health care based on pretending that services paid for or delivered by the private sector somehow don't count as expenses:

There's a central fallacy in the privatize medicare crusade. "Unsustainable" public health spending will magically become sustainable simply by shifting costs from the taxpayer to the patient and from the wealthy to the sick.

"Bluntly, this is a lie," says Canada's pre-eminent health economist, Dr. Robert Evans.
...
The 92 per cent of Canadians who know they're better off financially with medicare can take solace in Evans' evisceration of the privatizers' "myths:"

Myth One: Canada's aging population will make health care unaffordable. Private health-care services, not an aging population, are driving health-care spending, says Evans. "The key cost-drivers in health-care services are the private, for-profit parts -- pharmaceuticals, dental, diagnostic tests and other non-insured services. Population aging increases health-care costs at only 0.8 per cent annually."

Myth Two: Health-care costs are eating up all the provincial budgets and crowding out other services. Medicare spending takes up about the same share of provincial revenues as it did 20 years ago, says Evans. "However, between 1997 and 2004, cuts in personal and corporate taxes removed about $170.8 billion from government revenues." An additional $35 billion annually has been lost to tax cuts every year since. "As a result, other non-health-care programs were cut, making it appear that the share of the budget for health care was increasing."

Myth Three: Public health-care spending is skyrocketing out of control. Not only is Canada's public health-care spending not skyrocketing, it is stable and below the OECD average, says Evans. It's spending on private care that is driving cost increases. Between 1975 and 2009, medicare spending -- on doctors and hospitals -- has remained steady at between four and five per cent of Canada's GDP. When private spending on services not covered by medicare is included, the cost escalation shoots up to 12 per cent per year. "Clearly a public, single-payer system is the way to control costs," Evans says.

Myth Four: Privatization of health services will control health costs. "Privatization is a way to avoid cost containment and provides greater income opportunities for providers of care and private insurers outside public control," says Evans.

- Jim Stanford expands on his analysis of the Canada-EU trade negotiations by pointing out the utter implausibility of the assumptions involved in the Cons' justification for it:

There is no historical basis to conclude that free trade agreements are good for either Canadian exports, or for Canadian trade balances. In the real world, free trade agreements (not surprisingly) tend to make existing trade imbalances even worse: this is true throughout economics, where deregulation generally tends to exacerbate the imbalances and unevenness of market outcomes. Despite this observed failure, pursuing free trade agreements seems to be the default, one-note policy response from Ottawa to Canada’s worsening global trade performance - which is currently delivering us the biggest current account deficits in our history.

- In the department of no surprises, corporate social responsibility has joined peace as extreme ideas which won't be tolerated by the Harper government.

- Finally, Jeffrey Simpson is absolutely right to note the willingness of roughly 30% of Canada's population to accept even the most blatantly obvious nonsense out of the Harper Cons - with polling on the census and Canada's bid for a Security Council seat serving as the latest examples. But it's worth noting the flip side to that number: the 30% must have awfully limited capacity to influence the rest of Canada's electorate if the Cons' general party numbers are stuck just barely above the number of people who will accept their word without question.