Juno News - July 09, 2024


Reality Checkļ¼š Canada does NOT have the best healthcare


Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

179.69907

Word count

3,356

Sentence count

188

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Jasmine Moulton challenges the idea that Canada has the best healthcare system in the world. She's joined by actor and comedian Jim Carrey to argue that Canada's healthcare system isn't as good as it should be.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 I'm Jasmine Moulton and it's time for a reality check.
00:00:10.480 Reality Check is a new show here at True North where we'll use facts and logic to debate the
00:00:14.520 most common talking points of the left. Here's how the show will roll out. We'll play clips of
00:00:18.840 the left giving those arguments and then I'll equip you with the facts you need to debunk them.
00:00:23.440 So let's get started. Our topic this week is Canadian healthcare. Take a listen.
00:00:27.300 I grew up in Canada. Okay. We have socialized medicine and I am I'm here to tell you that this
00:00:34.120 line that you get on all of the political shows from people is that it's a failure. The system is
00:00:40.660 a failure in Canada. It is not a failure in Canada. I never waited for anything in my life. I chose my
00:00:45.800 own doctors. My mother never paid for a prescription. It was fantastic and I just got back from Vancouver
00:00:51.740 and I keep hearing this like Canadians are so nice. Canadians are so nice. They can be nice.
00:00:57.300 Because they have health care. Because they have a government that cares about them.
00:01:04.120 It doesn't say sink or f***ing swim pal. Right. Or you live in a box. Yeah. There are certain people 0.90
00:01:10.220 in our society that need to be taken care of. There are there are people without as many opportunities
00:01:15.340 that need to be helped toward those opportunities. There are people who are sick. But that's the
00:01:20.340 thing. You shouldn't have to lose your home. And as your mother got sick. For our audio only listeners
00:01:24.300 that was actor and comedian Jim Carrey. He was on the Bill Maurer show a late night American TV show
00:01:29.920 and I don't know why he thinks he's such an authority on Canadian healthcare. He left the country at the age
00:01:36.440 of 19 which usually you use the healthcare system a little more as you age. So presumably he did not use
00:01:42.420 it that much when he was that young. When he was 19 that was over 40 years ago. He left the country in
00:01:47.500 1981. So let's just put that on the table. Moving on. Jim Carrey said a lot of things in that clip but
00:01:54.680 his main argument is that Canada has the best healthcare system in the world. When you're
00:01:58.500 disagreeing with leftists a good approach is to find first common ground. Things that you agree on.
00:02:04.800 There are a lot of things he said in that rant that I disagree with. But the one thing that he did say
00:02:09.140 is that there are some people who need to be cared for in society. It's a famous Gandhi quote that says
00:02:13.760 a society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members. Broadly speaking most Canadians
00:02:19.520 would agree that low income or the elderly any sort of vulnerable Canadian should not be denied
00:02:25.460 healthcare simply because they can't afford it. Now it's a good strategy and a good tactic to
00:02:29.980 acknowledge your common ground. Things you agree on especially in this case because it disarms whoever
00:02:35.580 you're speaking to the ability to criticize you for being some sort of heartless or uncaring person
00:02:40.520 who doesn't care about the plight of the poor. But now that you've established that common ground
00:02:44.340 you should move into your argument. Many studies by many different groups have all confirmed that
00:02:49.240 despite Canada spending a lot of money on its healthcare in relation to comparable countries either
00:02:54.600 in terms of high-income countries, industrialized countries or other countries even that have
00:02:59.820 universal access healthcare systems, Canada's outcomes do not rank highly in comparison.
00:03:06.400 The Fraser Institute compared the performance of 28 different countries with universal healthcare
00:03:10.720 and found Canada was not only one of the highest spenders but our country ends up near the bottom
00:03:17.240 when you look at indicators such as the number of doctors per population, hospital beds, MRIs and also
00:03:24.160 Canada has the longest wait times. And the Commonwealth Fund which is an American-based organization
00:03:29.420 that looks at best healthcare practices from systems around the world from other high-income countries
00:03:35.080 and they do this to try and improve the American system, they found similar findings as the Fraser
00:03:40.300 Institute report that emergency department wait times were longest in Canada and wait times for
00:03:45.520 specialists were longest in Canada and these metrics were not improving. An article from the
00:03:49.840 Montreal Economic Institute had similar findings. They point out and I quote,
00:03:53.740 in Canada, 18% of people waited four months or longer for elective surgeries. Other universal healthcare
00:04:01.000 systems that, unlike ours, maintain a strong role for private insurance had much lower wait times for
00:04:06.420 elective surgeries. In Switzerland, only 6% of patients had waited four months or longer. In the Netherlands,
00:04:11.900 just 4% and in Germany, zero. So the fundamental argument here to counter the left's idea that Canada has
00:04:18.540 the best healthcare system in the world is that access to wait lists do not equal access to healthcare.
00:04:24.460 Secondstreet.org is a new Canadian think tank that has done incredible work on this topic. I really
00:04:29.580 encourage everybody listening to go check out their work. It really adds a human face to some of these
00:04:35.580 healthcare statistics that we often can brush over when they're on paper, but really there is an element
00:04:40.700 here of human suffering both in terms of pain and death that need to be considered very strongly when we're
00:04:45.900 talking about healthcare wait times. Secondstreet published a report on healthcare wait times back in
00:04:50.860 December 2021 and here's what they found. In the year 2020 to 2021, at least 11,581 patients died while
00:04:59.900 waiting for surgeries, procedures, and diagnostic scans in Canada. They also found that waiting list deaths
00:05:06.540 are on the rise in this country. So as you can see, there's a real human cost here to wait lists in Canada.
00:05:12.060 Shockingly, judges out in BC ruled against letting Canadian patients seek access to medical care
00:05:18.620 outside the public system, even when the wait lists are too long. In this case involving the Canby Surgery
00:05:23.660 Centre out in Vancouver, the CBC reported that judges wrote, although wait lists denied some patients
00:05:29.180 their charter right to life and security of the person, those violations are permitted under the
00:05:34.700 principles of fundamental justice because the law is meant to ensure equitable provision of healthcare and
00:05:40.300 prevent the creation of a two-tier system where access depends on wealth. This word two-tier
00:05:45.980 always comes up in any sort of discussion about healthcare reform in Canada. So here's how to
00:05:50.780 effectively address that argument when that word comes up. Number one, it's unethical for the government 0.96
00:05:55.900 to deny Canadians access to healthcare alternatives if the government's monopoly on healthcare in this
00:06:00.940 country is not providing timely access to healthcare. Secondly, a lot of times when Canadians talk about
00:06:07.260 two-tier healthcare system, they always make this argument that if you did have a private option
00:06:13.260 for some, that would only lengthen the wait times for people in the government systems. But just logically
00:06:18.220 thinking this through, this would not happen. If there were 10 people in line in a government system,
00:06:23.020 and then five of them left to go to a different system, then obviously the five left in the government
00:06:28.860 system would move up the wait list, get their treatment faster, it works out for everybody. Finally, what people who
00:06:35.580 fear-monger about this two-tier system always fail to acknowledge is that already currently in Canada,
00:06:41.260 there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians who leave every year to go find medically necessary
00:06:46.540 treatment. Another report from secondstreet.org shows that Canadian patients made at least 217,500
00:06:54.300 trips to other countries in 2017 alone specifically for healthcare. That's an insane number considering
00:07:00.620 it's only for one year. Secondstreet.org also gives some context of just how big that number is.
00:07:06.460 So if you think of the Rogers Centre, which is a baseball stadium in Toronto where the Blue Jays play,
00:07:11.180 it's pretty big. So if you've seen a picture, we've got one on the screen here for our YouTube listeners,
00:07:16.220 it's massive. The capacity is over 53,000. So you would have to fill that thing full to the brim
00:07:23.660 four times, full of Canadians, just to calculate the number of Canadians who went abroad to seek medically necessary
00:07:29.660 healthcare treatments in 2017. Okay, so that was a lot of information. But to recap, when leftists
00:07:36.220 make this argument that Canada has the best healthcare system in the world, first, you can
00:07:40.620 state your agreement that you don't think that poor and vulnerable Canadians should be denied access to
00:07:45.900 healthcare simply on the basis of their income. Next, you need to argue that access to a waitlist is
00:07:50.460 not the same as access to healthcare. Third, you should point out that even though Canada is one of the
00:07:54.300 biggest spenders on healthcare when it comes to universal comparable systems, we have some of the poorest
00:07:59.020 performance indicators. My favorite line is that ultimately people vote with their feet. If
00:08:03.340 hundreds of thousands of Canadians are fleeing the country every single year in pursuit of timely
00:08:08.140 medical treatments, clearly there's something wrong with Canada's healthcare system. Moving on,
00:08:11.980 let's debunk argument number two. Now, you might hear this all the time, the left will say that
00:08:16.300 Canada's healthcare is free. While healthcare is administered by provinces, there are slight variations
00:08:22.060 in every province. I live in Ontario and I can attest to the fact that no, not all healthcare is free.
00:08:27.580 I pay for my vision care, I pay for my dental care, and I often will pay for prescriptions. Sometimes
00:08:32.700 you'll have an employer who will have a plan, but those things are not included under Canada's
00:08:37.260 quote-unquote free healthcare system. The more obvious retort to this argument from the left that
00:08:42.380 our healthcare system is free is that obviously nothing is free. There's no such thing as government
00:08:48.620 money. All of the money that government spends comes from our pockets, so we pay taxes for our healthcare
00:08:53.660 services. Admittedly, it's difficult to understand how much each individual pays for healthcare services
00:08:59.900 that they receive every year because in Canada, as we mentioned in other podcasts, we have a graduated
00:09:04.380 tax system here, so one family might pay a different amount of money for healthcare every year versus 0.58
00:09:09.020 another family. Although the Fraser Institute did an interesting study on this, so what they found was that
00:09:14.300 if you try and find a typical Canadian family, two working parents and then maybe two kids, so a family
00:09:21.420 of four altogether, they found that for the average Canadian family, they would pay $15,039 per year
00:09:28.780 in taxes for healthcare in Canada. But of course, there are other costs than just what we pay in taxes
00:09:34.700 that are associated with our choice to have this universal healthcare system in Canada. If you consider,
00:09:39.900 for example, opportunity costs. Opportunity costs meaning because we've chosen this type of healthcare
00:09:45.260 system, what other sorts of costs are we incurring even in the form of missed opportunities? And as we
00:09:51.260 saw over the past two years with COVID-19 lockdowns, our healthcare system capacity really extended the cost of
00:09:59.340 lockdowns and the economic damage done in Canada because we extended the length of our lockdowns due to
00:10:05.100 healthcare capacity. As Dr. Sean Motley points out, throughout COVID-19, Toronto has had the dubious
00:10:10.860 distinction of being one of the most locked down cities in the world, despite the fact that its
00:10:15.740 hospitalizations per capita have remained far lower than many other cities. The sad reality is that our
00:10:21.980 system faces catastrophe when there are only a few hundred extra patients in intensive care units. And of
00:10:27.980 course, this finding is corroborated by a Fraser Institute study that looked at other healthcare systems that
00:10:33.980 are universal in access to compare Canada's system and Canada ranked 25th out of a total of 26 countries
00:10:40.940 they were considering in number of acute care beds per 1000 people. So to recap, when people argue that Canada's
00:10:47.180 healthcare system is free, it obviously is not free. We pay for it through hefty taxes and there are pretty
00:10:53.020 substantial opportunity costs associated with having a socialized healthcare system. Alright, let's move on to the next
00:10:58.380 leftist argument. Take a listen.
00:11:00.380 Exhibit A, Doug Ford. On the campaign trail, conservative politicians love to say they're
00:11:07.020 for the people. But we know what happens once they're in office. Families here in Ontario have seen just how
00:11:13.420 far they're willing to go to help the wealthiest few. How quickly they will make cuts to public health and to
00:11:19.820 the services people rely on most. They don't understand that you can't cut your way to prosperity. Doug Ford
00:11:29.340 threatened cuts to Ontario's autism program. He canceled an out of country OHIP program. And he cut Ontario's
00:11:37.180 pharmacare program that was focused on the needs of kids and young adults. Rewarding the wealthy and big polluters and making life
00:11:45.820 harder for the middle class. That's what conservative politicians do. You might have recognized that 0.93
00:11:51.660 voice if you're an audio listener, but if you didn't see who that was, that's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
00:11:56.300 explaining another leftist argument when it comes to healthcare in Canada, which they excuse the failings
00:12:03.500 of the system by saying, well, it's just underfunded. You know, conservatives have made cuts to the healthcare
00:12:08.620 system year over year. And it's because of these quote unquote conservative cuts that our social
00:12:14.700 healthcare system is not functioning as well as it should be. So quick math, Justin Trudeau was elected
00:12:20.220 back in 2015, which means he's been in power for seven years. If he really was so concerned about
00:12:25.340 quote unquote cuts that the previous government had made, he'd have had more than enough time to
00:12:30.620 recuperate those quote unquote losses for the healthcare system. But of course, it's not even true
00:12:35.500 that the previous government cut healthcare funding. In Canada, the previous government that was in power
00:12:40.300 before Justin Trudeau was a conservative government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. And it's pretty
00:12:46.300 easy to debunk Trudeau's claim if you just go back and look budget by budget. From the time Harper got
00:12:51.580 into office to the time he left, healthcare funding increased, end of story, debunked, boom. Next, even in
00:12:56.860 my home province of Ontario, which is the most populous province in the country, our conservative
00:13:01.580 leader, Premier Doug Ford has also brought healthcare spending to historic highs. So it's simply just not the
00:13:07.500 case that conservative politicians cut healthcare spending. Beyond that, as we've already stated on
00:13:11.260 this show, Canada is one of the top spenders on healthcare in the world. Switzerland took first
00:13:16.700 place by a hair, they spend about 11.4% of their GDP on healthcare, whereas Canada spends 11.3%, but
00:13:24.460 very similar. So Canada is amongst the top spenders on healthcare in the world. But as Dr. Sean Watley
00:13:30.540 aptly points out, Canada is spending more, but we're getting a lot less for all of that money that we're
00:13:35.660 spending. In a news article he published, he says this, in 1990, the province had 33,403 acute care
00:13:43.180 hospital beds, or 3.2 per 1000 population, and healthcare spending represented 8.3% of the province's GDP.
00:13:51.580 By 2017, Ontario only had 18,571 beds, or 1.3 per 1000 people, but health spending rose to 11.3% of GDP.
00:14:04.060 This is simply bad value for money, and any politician who argues that we simply need to
00:14:09.420 dump more money into the system to improve it is ignoring the fact that we have been increasing
00:14:14.300 healthcare spending for decades and been getting less as a result. It's time for more innovation
00:14:19.740 and competition, but that's a little bit difficult when you only have a single-payer socialized healthcare
00:14:24.780 system. Last but not least, let's get to the left's most common argument when it comes to Canada's
00:14:29.980 healthcare system, and that is that any sort of privatization talk will lead to the Americanization
00:14:35.100 of the Canadian healthcare system. Take a listen. Had we not won the 2019 election, I wake up in a cold
00:14:42.380 sweat thinking about that. Do you think that Conservatives would have provided the support
00:14:47.820 to individuals and to businesses that we did? Do you think they would have bought the vaccines that we
00:14:53.020 did? No. I don't think so, and so it really really matters, and it matters for the future. We put out,
00:15:03.340 I think we put this out already, if not you guys are going to get the scoop on the rest of the country,
00:15:08.060 but we tweeted out some video of Erin O'Toole during the Conservative Leadership Campaign
00:15:16.780 where he talks about privatizing Medicare. Can you believe that? Would you be prepared to allow
00:15:23.980 provinces to experiment with real healthcare reform, including the provision of private, for-profit,
00:15:30.460 and non-profit healthcare options inside of universal coverage? Yes. Now I'll elaborate a little bit more.
00:15:38.860 We can't have just one old model that is increasingly becoming inefficient, and we have to find
00:15:46.940 public-private synergies, and that capital will come in to drive efficiencies. I've run on this for
00:15:55.980 several years now. So what we just heard there was Canada's Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland when she
00:16:02.460 was campaigning back in 2021, fear-mongering about what Conservatives would do to privatize Canadian
00:16:08.940 healthcare, leading to the Americanization of our system. We heard a lot of clips there from different
00:16:14.380 media outlets, legacy media in Canada, talking about how scary it is, this prospect of privatization.
00:16:21.580 Now it's important to note that politicians on the left, and even legacy media, stand to benefit
00:16:26.940 immensely from fear-mongering about privatization within the Canadian healthcare system. On the left,
00:16:32.060 it really rallies and motivates their base to say that if Conservatives get elected, they're going to
00:16:36.380 privatize the system. It's going to be just like down in the US, where apparently you have to sell your home
00:16:40.540 to get a medical treatment, according to Jim Carrey. The media also stands to gain viewers by
00:16:45.740 fear-mongering about this topic. But both, in fact, are doing Canadians a disservice by stifling
00:16:50.300 conversations about meaningful healthcare reform in Canada. As we've already detailed in the show,
00:16:55.020 many studies have confirmed that the best performing universal healthcare systems in the world
00:17:00.220 incorporate elements of private care. But as long as the legacy media and politicians on the left make it
00:17:05.100 politically lethal to discuss any sort of form of privatization, Canada's healthcare system will remain
00:17:11.180 stagnant in its current form of failing to deliver meaningful health treatments on time to Canadians.
00:17:16.300 All right, so clearly leftists have a lot to say about the Canadian healthcare system, but let's do
00:17:19.900 a quick recap. Here are their four main arguments. One, Canada's healthcare system is the best system in
00:17:24.940 the world. Two, it's free. Three, its problems are just due to underfunding. Four, we can't talk of
00:17:30.300 privatization because it will lead to an American system. And here's how you counter those policies.
00:17:34.780 One, Canada's healthcare system is one of the best funded yet poorest performing universal healthcare
00:17:39.980 systems. Two, it costs Canadians thousands per year in hefty taxes. Three, while healthcare spending is
00:17:45.580 going up, performance is actually going down. And four, the top performing universal healthcare systems
00:17:50.700 in the world all incorporate elements of private care. So here's a reality check. Canada's healthcare
00:17:56.060 system is in dire need of reform and we can make a lot of improvements improve healthcare for all
00:18:01.100 Canadians simply by adopting best practices from other universal healthcare systems in the world,
00:18:05.660 including a role for private insurance. So it's time our leaders stop politicizing this issue in
00:18:10.540 Canada and start delivering results for Canadians. Our lives depend on it. That's our show for this
00:18:14.940 week. I hope you enjoyed the show. Don't forget to tune in every Wednesday to Reality Check Podcast.
00:18:19.820 You can find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave us a five-star review so
00:18:24.220 others like you can find the show. I'm Jasmine Molten and this is Reality Check.