Reality Checkļ¼ Canada does NOT have the best healthcare system
Episode Stats
Words per minute
179.80379
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
sentences flagged
Toxicity
1
sentences flagged
Hate speech
2
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, Jasmine Moulton challenges the idea that Canada has the best healthcare system in the world. In fact, Canadian healthcare is not as good as other countries in terms of access and access to care, and Canada has some of the worst wait times compared to other countries.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I'm Jasmine Moulton and it's time for a Reality Check.
00:00:10.440
Reality Check is a new show here at Chew North where we'll use facts and logic to debate the
00:00:14.480
most common talking points of the left. Here's how the show will roll out. We'll play clips of
00:00:18.800
the left giving those arguments and then I'll equip you with the facts you need to debunk them.
00:00:23.400
So let's get started. Our topic this week is Canadian healthcare. Take a listen.
00:00:27.240
I grew up in Canada okay we have socialized medicine and I am I'm here to tell you that this
00:00:34.060
line that you get on all of the political shows from people is that it's a failure. The system is
00:00:40.620
a failure in Canada. It is not a failure in Canada. I never waited for anything in my life. I chose my
00:00:45.740
own doctors. My mother never paid for a prescription. It was fantastic and I just got back from Vancouver
00:00:51.700
and I keep hearing this like Canadians are so nice. Canadians are so nice. They can be nice.
00:00:57.240
Because they have health care. Because they have a government that cares about them.
00:01:04.060
It doesn't say sink or f***ing swim pal. Right. Or you live in a box. Yeah. There are certain people
0.90
00:01:10.160
in our society that need to be taken care of. There are there are people without as many opportunities
00:01:15.280
that need to be helped toward those opportunities. There are people who are sick. But that's the
00:01:20.280
you shouldn't have to lose your home. And as your mother got sick. For our audio only listeners that
00:01:24.740
was actor and comedian Jim Carrey. He was on the Bill Maurer show a late night American TV show and
00:01:30.680
I don't know why he thinks he's such an authority on Canadian healthcare. He left the country at the age
00:01:36.400
of 19 which usually you use the healthcare system a little more as you age. So presumably he did not use
00:01:42.380
it that much when he was that young. When he was 19 that was over 40 years ago. He left the country in
00:01:47.460
1981. So let's just put that on the table. Moving on. Jim Carrey said a lot of things in that clip but
00:01:54.620
his main argument is that Canada has the best healthcare system in the world. When you're
00:01:58.460
disagreeing with leftists a good approach is to find first common ground. Things that you agree on.
00:02:04.760
There are a lot of things he said in that rant that I disagree with. But the one thing that he did say
00:02:09.080
is that there are some people who need to be cared for in society. It's a famous Gandhi quote that says
00:02:13.700
a society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members. Broadly speaking most Canadians
00:02:19.440
would agree that low income or the elderly any sort of vulnerable Canadian should not be denied
00:02:25.420
healthcare simply because they can't afford it. Now it's a good strategy and a good tactic to
00:02:29.940
acknowledge your common ground. Things you agree on especially in this case because it disarms whoever
00:02:35.540
you're speaking to the ability to criticize you for being some sort of heartless or uncaring person
00:02:40.460
who doesn't care about the plight of the poor. But now that you've established that common ground
00:02:44.300
you should move into your argument. Many studies by many different groups have all confirmed that
00:02:49.200
despite Canada spending a lot of money on its healthcare in relation to comparable countries either
00:02:54.540
in terms of high-income countries, industrialized countries or other countries even that have
00:02:59.780
universal access healthcare systems, Canada's outcomes do not rank highly in comparison.
00:03:06.360
The Fraser Institute compared the performance of 28 different countries with universal healthcare
00:03:10.680
and found Canada was not only one of the highest spenders but our country ends up near the bottom
00:03:17.180
when you look at indicators such as the number of doctors per population, hospital beds, MRIs and also
00:03:24.120
Canada has the longest wait times. And the Commonwealth Fund which is an American-based organization
00:03:29.360
that looks at best healthcare practices from systems around the world from other high-income countries
00:03:35.040
and they do this to try and improve the American system, they found similar findings as the Fraser
00:03:40.260
Institute report that emergency department wait times were longest in Canada and wait times for
00:03:45.480
specialists were longest in Canada and these metrics were not improving. An article from the
00:03:49.800
Montreal Economic Institute had similar findings. They point out and I quote,
00:03:53.680
In Canada, 18% of people waited four months or longer for elective surgeries. Other universal healthcare
00:04:00.960
systems that, unlike ours, maintain a strong role for private insurance had much lower wait times for
00:04:06.380
elective surgeries. In Switzerland, only 6% of patients had waited four months or longer. In the Netherlands,
00:04:11.860
just 4% and in Germany, zero. So the fundamental argument here to counter the left's idea that Canada has
00:04:18.500
the best healthcare system in the world is that access to wait lists do not equal access to healthcare.
00:04:24.420
SecondStreet.org is a new Canadian think tank that has done incredible work on this topic. I really
00:04:29.540
encourage everybody listening to go check out their work. It really adds a human face to some of these
00:04:35.540
healthcare statistics that we often can brush over when they're on paper but really there is an element
00:04:40.660
here of human suffering both in terms of pain and death that need to be considered very strongly when we're
00:04:45.860
talking about healthcare wait times. SecondStreet published a report on healthcare wait times back in
00:04:50.820
December 2021 and here's what they found. In the year 2020 to 2021, at least 11,581 patients died while
00:04:59.860
waiting for surgeries, procedures and diagnostic scans in Canada. They also found that waiting list deaths are
00:05:06.660
on the rise in this country. So as you can see there's a real human cost here to wait lists in Canada. Shockingly,
00:05:12.740
judges out in BC ruled against letting Canadian patients seek access to medical care outside the
00:05:19.060
public system even when the wait lists are too long. In this case involving the Canby Surgery Center out
00:05:24.180
in Vancouver, the CBC reported that judges wrote, although wait lists denied some patients their charter
00:05:29.700
right to life and security of the person, those violations are permitted under the principles of
00:05:35.220
fundamental justice because the law is meant to ensure equitable provision of healthcare and prevent the
00:05:40.740
creation of a two-tier system where access depends on wealth. This word two-tier always comes up in any
00:05:47.060
sort of discussion about healthcare reform in Canada. So here's how to effectively address that argument when
00:05:52.980
that word comes up. Number one, it's unethical for the government to deny Canadians access to healthcare
00:05:57.860
alternatives if the government's monopoly on healthcare in this country is not providing timely access to
00:06:03.460
healthcare. Secondly, a lot of times when Canadians talk about two-tier healthcare system, they always make this
0.97
00:06:09.860
argument that if you did have a private option for some, that would only lengthen the wait times for
00:06:15.700
people in the government systems. But just logically thinking this through, this would not happen. If there
00:06:20.660
were 10 people in line in a government system and then five of them left to go to a different system,
00:06:25.780
then obviously the five left in the government system would move up the wait list, get their treatment
00:06:32.020
faster. It works out for everybody. Finally, what people who fear-monger about this two-tier system
00:06:37.700
always fail to acknowledge is that already currently in Canada, there are hundreds of thousands of
00:06:42.820
Canadians who leave every year to go find medically necessary treatment. Another report from secondstreet.org
00:06:48.900
shows that Canadian patients made at least 217,500 trips to other countries in 2017 alone specifically
00:06:58.100
for healthcare. That's an insane number considering it's only for one year. Secondstreet.org also gives
00:07:03.460
some context of just how big that number is. So if you think of the Rogers Centre, which is a baseball
00:07:08.580
stadium in Toronto where the Blue Jays play, it's pretty big. So if you've seen a picture, we've got
00:07:13.460
one on the screen here for our YouTube listeners. It's massive. The capacity is over 53,000. So you would
00:07:20.260
have to fill that thing full to the brim four times full of Canadians just to calculate the number of Canadians
00:07:27.460
who went abroad to seek medically necessary healthcare treatments in 2017. Okay, so that was a lot of
00:07:33.460
information. But to recap, when leftists make this argument that Canada has the best healthcare system
00:07:38.820
in the world, first, you can state your agreement that you don't think that poor and vulnerable
00:07:44.020
Canadians should be denied access to healthcare simply on the basis of their income. Next, you need
0.99
00:07:48.420
to argue that access to a waitlist is not the same as access to healthcare. Third, you should point out
00:07:52.980
that even though Canada is one of the biggest spenders on healthcare when it comes to universal
00:07:56.740
comparable systems, we have some of the poorest performance indicators. My favourite line is that
00:08:01.220
ultimately people vote with their feet. If hundreds of thousands of Canadians are fleeing the country
00:08:06.100
every single year in pursuit of timely medical treatments, clearly there's something wrong with
00:08:10.260
Canada's healthcare system. Moving on, let's debunk argument number two. Now, you might hear this all
00:08:14.900
the time. The left will say that Canada's healthcare is free. While healthcare is administered by
00:08:20.020
provinces, so that there are slight variations in every province, I live in Ontario and I can attest to the
00:08:24.820
fact that no, not all healthcare is free. I pay for my vision care, I pay for my dental care,
00:08:30.420
and I often will pay for prescriptions. Sometimes you'll have an employer who will have a plan,
00:08:34.740
but those things are not included under Canada's quote-unquote free healthcare system. The more obvious
00:08:39.780
retort to this argument from the left that our healthcare system is free is that obviously nothing
00:08:46.100
is free. There's no such thing as government money. All of the money that government spends comes from our
00:08:51.220
pockets. So we pay taxes for our healthcare services. Admittedly, it's difficult to understand how much
00:08:57.220
each individual pays for healthcare services that they receive every year because in Canada, as we
00:09:02.260
mentioned in other podcasts, we have a graduated tax system here. So one family might pay a different
00:09:07.140
amount of money for healthcare every year versus another family. Although the Fraser Institute did an
00:09:11.220
interesting study on this. So what they found was that if you try and find a typical Canadian family,
00:09:17.140
two working parents, and then maybe two kids, so a family of four altogether, they found that for the average
00:09:24.260
Canadian family, they would pay $15,039 per year in taxes for healthcare in Canada. But of course, there are
00:09:32.100
other costs than just what we pay in taxes that are associated with our choice to have this universal
00:09:38.100
healthcare system in Canada. If you consider, for example, opportunity costs, opportunity costs meaning
00:09:43.300
because we've chosen this type of healthcare system, what other sorts of costs are we incurring,
00:09:48.260
even in the form of missed opportunities. And as we saw over the past two years with COVID-19 lockdowns,
00:09:54.740
our healthcare system capacity really extended the cost of lockdowns and the economic damage done in
00:10:01.300
Canada because we extended the length of our lockdowns due to healthcare capacity. As Dr. Sean
00:10:07.060
Watley points out, throughout COVID-19, Toronto has had the dubious distinction of being one of the
00:10:12.260
most locked down cities in the world, despite the fact that its hospitalizations per capita have
00:10:17.860
remained far lower than many other cities. The sad reality is that our system faces catastrophe when
00:10:24.100
there are only a few hundred extra patients in intensive care units. And of course, this finding
00:10:28.820
is corroborated by a Fraser Institute study that looked at other healthcare systems that are universal in
00:10:34.820
access to compare Canada's system. And Canada ranked 25th out of a total of 26 countries they were
00:10:41.140
considering and number of acute care beds per 1000 people. So to recap, when people argue that
00:10:46.660
Canada's healthcare system is free, it obviously is not free. We pay for it through hefty taxes,
00:10:52.260
and there are pretty substantial opportunity costs associated with having a socialized healthcare
00:10:56.660
system. All right, let's move on to the next leftist argument. Take a listen.
00:10:59.780
Exhibit A, Doug Ford. On the campaign trail, conservative politicians love to say they're
00:11:06.980
for the people. But we know what happens once they're in office. Families here in Ontario have
00:11:12.740
seen just how far they're willing to go to help the wealthiest few. How quickly they will make cuts to
00:11:18.820
public health and to the services people rely on most. They don't understand that you can't cut your
00:11:26.260
way to prosperity. Doug Ford threatened cuts to Ontario's autism program. He canceled an out-of-country
00:11:34.260
OHIP program. And he cut Ontario's pharmacare program that was focused on the needs of kids
00:11:40.500
and young adults. Rewarding the wealthy and big polluters and making life harder for the middle
0.80
00:11:46.900
class. That's what conservative politicians do. You might have recognized that voice if you're an
00:11:52.260
audio listener, but if you didn't see who that was, that's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explaining
00:11:57.300
another leftist argument when it comes to healthcare in Canada, which they excuse the failings
00:12:03.460
of the system by saying, well, it's just underfunded. You know, conservatives have made cuts to the
00:12:08.180
healthcare system year over year. And it's because of these quote unquote conservative cuts that our
00:12:14.260
social healthcare system is not functioning as well as it should be. So quick math, Justin Trudeau was
00:12:19.780
elected back in 2015, which means he's been in power for seven years. If he really was so concerned
00:12:24.980
about quote unquote cuts that the previous government had made, he'd have had more than enough time to
00:12:30.580
recuperate those quote unquote losses for the healthcare system. But of course, it's not even true
00:12:35.460
that the previous government cut healthcare funding. In Canada, the previous government that
00:12:39.780
was in power before Justin Trudeau was a conservative government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
00:12:44.420
And it's pretty easy to debunk Trudeau's claim if you just go back and look budget by budget. From the
00:12:50.740
time Harper got into office to the time he left, healthcare funding increased, end of story, debunked,
00:12:55.700
boom. Next, even in my home province of Ontario, which is the most populous province in the country,
00:13:00.740
our conservative leader, Premier Doug Ford, has also brought healthcare spending to historic highs.
00:13:06.340
So it's simply just not the case that conservative politicians cut healthcare spending. Beyond that,
00:13:10.180
as we've already stated on this show, Canada is one of the top spenders on healthcare in the world.
00:13:15.460
Switzerland took first place by a hair. They spend about 11.4% of their GDP on healthcare,
00:13:22.340
whereas Canada spends 11.3%, but very similar. So Canada is amongst the top spenders on healthcare
00:13:27.940
in the world. But as Dr. Sean Watley aptly points out, Canada is spending more, but we're getting a
00:13:33.860
lot less for all of that money that we're spending. In a news article he published, he says this.
00:13:38.500
In 1990, the province had 33,403 acute care hospital beds, or 3.2 per 1,000 population,
00:13:47.140
and healthcare spending represented 8.3% of the province's GDP. By 2017, Ontario only had 18,571 beds,
00:13:57.460
or 1.3 per 1,000 people, but health spending rose to 11.3% of GDP. This is simply bad value for money,
00:14:06.180
and any politician who argues that we simply need to dump more money into the system to improve it
00:14:12.100
is ignoring the fact that we have been increasing healthcare spending for decades and been getting
00:14:16.980
less as a result. It's time for more innovation and competition, but that's a little bit difficult
00:14:22.020
when you only have a single-payer socialized healthcare system. Last but not least, let's get to the
00:14:26.500
left's most common argument when it comes to Canada's healthcare system, and that is that any sort of
00:14:32.340
privatization talk will lead to the Americanization of the Canadian healthcare system. Take a listen.
00:14:37.780
Had we not won the 2019 election, I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about that. Do you think that
00:14:44.820
Conservatives would have provided the support to individuals and to businesses that we did?
00:14:50.420
Do you think they would have bought the vaccines that we did? I don't think so. And so it really,
00:14:56.500
really matters, and it matters for the future. We put out, I think we put this out already. If not,
00:15:05.060
you guys are going to get the scoop on the rest of the country. But we tweeted out some video of
00:15:11.300
Aaron O'Toole during the Conservative leadership campaign where he talks about privatizing Medicare.
00:15:20.180
Can you believe that? Would you be prepared to allow provinces to experiment with real healthcare
00:15:26.900
reform including the provision of private, for-profit, and non-profit healthcare options inside of universal coverage?
00:15:35.540
Yes. Now I'll elaborate a little bit more. We can't have just one old model that is increasingly becoming
00:15:44.500
inefficient. And we have to find public-private synergies. And that capital will come in to drive efficiencies.
00:15:54.180
I've run on this for several years now. So what we just heard there was Canada's Finance Minister,
00:16:01.140
Chrystia Freeland, when she was campaigning back in 2021, fear-mongering about what Conservatives would
00:16:06.740
do to privatize Canadian healthcare, leading to the Americanization of our system. We heard a lot
00:16:12.980
of clips there from different media outlets, legacy media in Canada, talking about how scary it is,
00:16:19.620
this prospect of privatization. Now it's important to note that politicians on the left and even
00:16:25.140
legacy media stand to benefit immensely from fear-mongering about privatization within the
00:16:29.860
Canadian healthcare system. On the left, it really rallies and motivates their base to say that if
00:16:34.980
Conservatives get elected, they're going to privatize the system. It's going to be just like
00:16:38.100
down in the U.S. where apparently you have to sell your home to get a medical treatment, according to
00:16:43.140
Jim Carrey. The media also stands to gain viewers by fear-mongering about this topic. But both, in fact,
00:16:47.940
are doing Canadians a disservice by stifling conversations about meaningful healthcare
00:16:52.020
reform in Canada. As we've already detailed in the show, many studies have confirmed that
00:16:56.740
the best performing universal healthcare systems in the world incorporate elements of private care.
00:17:01.940
But as long as the legacy media and politicians on the left make it politically lethal to discuss
00:17:07.060
any sort of form of privatization, Canada's healthcare system will remain stagnant in its current
00:17:12.180
form of failing to deliver meaningful health treatments on time to Canadians.
00:17:16.260
Alright, so clearly leftists have a lot to say about the Canadian healthcare system,
00:17:19.380
but let's do a quick recap. Here are their four main arguments.
00:17:22.420
1. Canada's healthcare system is the best system in the world.
00:17:29.140
4. We can't talk of privatization because it will lead to an American system.
00:17:34.820
1. Canada's healthcare system is one of the best funded yet poorest performing universal healthcare
00:17:40.820
2. It costs Canadians thousands per year in hefty taxes.
00:17:44.100
3. While healthcare spending is going up, performance is actually going down.
00:17:48.020
And 4. The top performing universal healthcare systems in the world all incorporate elements
00:17:53.620
So here's a reality check. Canada's healthcare system is in dire need of reform and we can make
00:17:58.740
a lot of improvements improve healthcare for all Canadians simply by adopting best practices from
00:18:03.620
other universal healthcare systems in the world, including a role for private insurance.
00:18:07.940
So it's time our leaders stop politicizing this issue in Canada and start delivering results for
00:18:13.940
That's our show for this week. I hope you enjoyed the show.
00:18:16.500
Don't forget to tune in every Wednesday to Reality Check Podcast. You can find us on YouTube
00:18:21.060
or wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave us a five-star review so others like you can find
00:18:25.300
the show. I'm Jasmine Mom and this is Reality Check.