Juno News - Reality Check： Canada does NOT have the best healthcare

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.

Juno News - July 09, 2024

Reality Check： Canada does NOT have the best healthcare

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