Parkland looks at The Bottom Line
Written By: Ileiren Byles
2006-04-20
Researchers at the University of Alberta's Parkland Institute say that the cold, hard facts about cold, hard cash don't point to the 'Third Way' as being the best way for health care.The research institute's latest publication, The Bottom Line: The Truth Behind Private Health Insurance in Canada, comes with a warning against further privatization of Alberta's health care system.
"Experience in Canada and other countries is clear: privatized health financing costs more, not less," said author Diana Gibson, a research director with the Parkland Institute. "We wanted to focus specifically on the funding side of this issue and move the debate beyond rhetoric and ideology and into the realm of evidence."
Gibson and co-author Colleen Fuller, president and co-founder of Pharmawatch, turned to three areas for their research - pre-medicare Canada, the current system of subsidized health care in Canada as well as various international examples. Although the book does look at some European models, the focus is primarily on the United States, said Gibson. "The book does draw heavily on the American model, and for good reason," she said. "The U.S. is the entity with which we are currently integrating our market and if we continue with that we will only be going down one path and that's toward the U.S. system."
Canadians don't have to look into the distant past to see what life was like without public health care. Before 1968, there were eight million Canadians without medical coverage and health care costs were the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in Canada, said Gibson.
That's a number that's echoed in the United States today. "In the U.S. health care is still one of the leading causes of bankruptcy," said Gibson. She added that 75 per cent of those people who declared bankruptcy due to health costs had insurance going into their health care crisis - it was the cost of insurance alone, rather than treatment, that caused their economic ruin.
What's more, she said, insurance companies won't provide coverage for everyone. "You have people with pre-existing conditions who do not get any coverage - if you've survived breast cancer, if you're obese, or even eight per cent of those people with hay fever are refused insurance."
Private health insurance is also bad for the medical profession, according to the report. American doctors routinely lose 15 - 30 per cent of their billings because private insurers deny their claims. In Canada before medicare it was not uncommon for doctors to lose tens of thousands of dollars per year in unpaid medical bills.
The Bottom Line concludes with a seven-point agenda to protect the rights of patients by strengthening and improving the public health financing system, which includes strengthening and expanding the Canada Health Act, introducing a pharmacare program and eliminating health-care premiums.
While researchers at the Parkland Institute don't exactly expect Alberta's Conservative government to take the book to heart, "our hope comes from the idea that maybe the public will pick it up and start demanding some different action from their government," said executive director Ricardo Acuna. "Our role is not to lobby government, but to make information available to the public."
Gibson had a word of encouragement for people who had protested loudly against the controversial Bill 11 in 2000, which suggested contracting out health-care services to private clinics. "A lot of people felt that all of these protests against Bill 11 were ignored, but the bill they ended up with was not the Bill 11 they started with. It was very much a watered-down version. They changed that bill dramatically and it was due to the controversy and protests."
Original: ExpressNews