Canada’s Health Care
Does Their System Really Work?
By Daniel Muniz

For decades, proponents of socialized medicine loved to tout Canada as an example of a successful government run health care system that covers all of its citizens. But there has always been one slight problem to using our neighbor to the north as a model of excellence and efficiency.

The Canadian health care system has never worked the way that many of its admirers have envisioned it to.

The biggest obstacle to the government controlling every facet of medical care is that every contingency has to be planned out and accounted for. Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work that way regardless of how everything is forecasted. Things change and sometimes at a moment’s notice. Also, there are outcomes that can easily be overlooked especially if there is one and only one provider that is responsible to solve all of your health problems especially since alternatives do not exist. Well, they do exist but not in Canada.

For instance, it is commonplace for Canadian hospitals to ship some of its patients to the United States if there is not enough capacity or resources available in their own facilities. Waiting lists for certain treatments is a harsh reality in Canada as well as in Europe and they are in fact a very much accepted way of life. But the problem is that there are certain procedures that cannot be put on a waiting list such as having a baby. As a result, Canadian hospitals conveniently use hospitals across the border for emergencies like giving birth.

In fact, the Cato Institute estimates that every year about one out of seven Canadian physicians will have to transfer patients to the United States for treatments that cannot be performed in their own country.

But what is more startling is that the only way that Canada been able to avoid a national crisis and tragedy is by using hospitals in the United States as a reliable backup for emergencies. And so far, this safety net has relatively worked well because treatments and additional capacity in American hospitals have always been readily available for Canadians to use as a last resort even as such use becomes more commonplace.

However, if this country ever had socialized medicine where treatments and services would be routinely rationed, then it is very likely that the United States would not be able to come to the aid of Canadian hospitals because we wouldn’t have any additional capacity to accept enough of our own people, much less for anyone else.

It is ironic but Canada’s health care system can only survive in its present form as long the United States doesn’t opt to nationalize its own health care. Otherwise, it would experience chaos if American hospitals were ever forced to reject their patients. So in other words, Canada actually needs America’s health care system to keep its free market framework exactly the way it currently is instead of having it nationalized. Otherwise, hospitals across our northern border would be facing real emergencies that they could not solve.

The beauty of the free market is that if there is money to be made, then there were be services offered to take care of the demand. However, in a centrally planned health care system, there is no such incentive. Instead, bureaucrats plan out what they think might happen in the future and then that is all that is available because by then, the government has either banned or ran out of business the alternatives such as the private health care industry.

In the United States, alternatives do exist and our country has tremendously benefited from having these choices available in being able to go just about anywhere to get medical care.

Now why doesn’t Canada simply expand its capacity and make more treatments available?

That is a fair question to ask particularly since the answer is rather obvious in that spending more money would allow the Canadian health care system to solve its problems. Unfortunately, the answer is not that easy.

Contrary to popular belief, free health care is not free. Somebody has to pay for it.

And as Canadians have already experienced the hard way, health care was already outrageously expensive to begin with and it being free didn’t make it any cheaper. So there are two choices: raise taxes or cut spending elsewhere in order to transfer the revenue.

In a big government, cutting any part of a budget is next to impossible to do because that means that somebody else's entitlement is going to be severely reduced or eliminated. There are just too many competing special interest groups that will make it impractical. As for raising taxes, Canadians are already under an enormous tax burden although that is the preferred path by most politicians who want to protect their pet projects.

Overall, the biggest problem in expecting a government to solve all of your problems is that you have to be willing to accept whatever they offer you even if it’s nothing. And that has been the case with the Canadian health care system. Some people are perfectly happy with the government rationing treatments and being put on a waiting list because they are repulsed by someone actually making a profit. However, there are others who don’t care for such tomfoolery because there are medical emergencies that still have to be swiftly dealt with.

Critics of the free market argue that our current system is crippled. There is no doubt that the nation’s health care system is under siege but having the government take it over is not going to make it any better.

There is a huge laundry list of items that can be fixed in our current system but the root of most of the problems rests with anti-market forces such as excessive government intervention, frivolous lawsuits, and the lack of competition that can help reduce costs. It is time to start examining the issues that are crippling health care in the United States and find practical solutions to them instead of allowing a bumbling big government to solve all of our problems.

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