Healthy move

The NDP's health care plan shouldn't surprise anybody, but it will nicely point out the contrast against the Libs' refusal to take serious action against privatization:

The NDP will defend public health care in the next parliament by:
- Refusing to permit the dismantling of Canada’s single-payer medicare system;
- Prohibiting the use of federal transfers, directly or indirectly, to subsidize a new, profit-making private insurance system covering medically-necessary services;
- Ensuring that no federal money be used to cover the salaries or costs of doctors and any other medical personnel involved in a new, separate, profit-making private insurance system; and
- Tough monitoring and enforcement of these rules.

About the only problem with the plan is that since the existing rules have been so poorly enforced, it may be too late to keep private medicine from taking a larger role even if better rules are more thoroughly enforced in the future. But then, that's more a problem with the Libs' record than it is with the NDP's policy...and it's certainly not a basis for preferring the complete neglect of the other two parties.