A Different Viewpoint
The precursor to the Canadian Health Care Act was the brainchild of
Tommy Douglas, the socialist premier of Saskatchewan. He had already enacted a socialist medical plan in Saskatchewan (that’s the prairies north of
Wyoming and North Dakota) in the late 1940s. Later, British Columbia,
Ontario and Alberta implemented their own systems of provincial socialist
medicine.
My mother’s oldest sister was married to a doctor from Saskatchewan during World War II. (He was a doctor, she was a nurse, and they were both with
the Canadian Armed Forces hospitals in Europe.) When they returned home to
the prairies after the war ended, he became a government-paid country doctor.
What I remember about him was that he never had any money and always
complained about the provincial government, his employer, and the system
and its problems.
More provinces implemented their own systems in the 50s and the 60s
while Canada enjoyed mostly Socialist Party rule. In 1966, Canada passed the
Medical Care Act that spelled out federal assistance to the provinces and what
care and services the act would cover. It has had some changes over the years,
has been bleeding money ever since.
Those relatives of mine who have been pregnant or have small children have
few complaints about their health care system. Canada’s maternity and delivery hospitals are great, as long as there are no major problems. I’ve sent my relatives news articles of stories about the lack of neonatal facilities in Alberta
and Saskatchewan that recount that, recently, more than 200 laboring women
with at-risk pregnancies have been airlifted to Bozeman, Montana (there’s a
high-tech medical metroplex), because there were no available beds anywhere
in Canada for the at-risk babies after delivery.
My relatives in Canada haven’t heard or read anything about this—must not
be something their press wants to publicize. However, if one of the children is
sick or has an earache, pediatricians will make house calls. Yes, it’s true! And
working moms can stay home after delivery and choose to receive either their
full salary for six months or half their salary every month for 12 months. They
tell me that this is paid by the government, but we all know that it’s paid by
their taxes, which run around 50 to 60% of gross income.
Unemployment is relatively easy to get. If, for some reason, you lose your
job, can’t work because of physical or mental issues, or you just quit, you will
receive pretty good unemployment wages for up to one year. Then you’ve got
to work another year to be eligible for another year of unemployment unless
you can prove “disability,” which I’m convinced is easy to do.
I’m embarrassed to relate that I have two cousins—one in British Columbia
in her 40s and one in Saskatchewan in her 50s—who haven’t worked in years.
They cite difficulties with working at a job, say they can’t handle the stress,
and have managed to find doctors to certify them as “disabled” so that they
can collect unemployment/disability benefits indefinitely. Although I’m told
that what they receive is not called “disability benefits,” I’m not really sure
what it is. Nobody really talks about it in the family, so I never get a straight
answer—just “the government is taking care of them.” I hear that phrase a lot
in Canada, and they are PROUD of the fact that the government will take care
of them. If it doesn’t, people tend to gloss over the difficulties, or joke about
them, and prefer not to go into details with me, their cousin in the States.
As for problems, let’s start with my Uncle Thorbert in Saskatchewan. Thorb
needed a hip replacement. The hip started bothering him around age 74, then
really bothering him at age 78, when they put him on a waiting list. He waited
more than three years, until age 82, for them to operate on him and replace it.
He went dancing at a family wedding at age 83, the first time he had been able
to do anything but limp with a walker since about age 77. He joked through it
