Juno News - August 04, 2022


Reality Checkļ¼š Canada does NOT have the best healthcare system


Episode Stats

Length

18 minutes

Words per Minute

179.80379

Word Count

3,354

Sentence Count

207


Summary


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
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
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
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
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.
00:17:25.540 2. It's free.
00:17:26.820 3. Its problems are just due to underfunding.
00:17:29.140 4. We can't talk of privatization because it will lead to an American system.
00:17:32.820 And here's how you counter those policies.
00:17:34.820 1. Canada's healthcare system is one of the best funded yet poorest performing universal healthcare
00:17:39.940 systems.
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
00:17:52.500 of private care.
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
00:18:12.260 Canadians. Our lives depend on it.
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.