Canada
souring on government-financed health care.
"You are seeing the Medicare orthodoxy of the last 30 years being questioned in Canada," said Dr. David Gratzer, a registered physician in Canada and the U.S., and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a nonprofit public-policy think tank. "Over the last two years, the health care system has dramatically changed to allow more private health care."
I am not surprised to find a cutting edge documentarist two years behind the times:
The Supreme Court of Canada, widely viewed as among the most liberal in the world, nearly two years ago allowed a man in Quebec to buy health care on his own — striking down 30 years of precedent and giving advocates for private health care a major victory.
The case is known as the Chaoulli decision, after Dr. Jacques Chaoulli, who took action against the system after a patient was forced to wait nearly one year for a hip replacement.
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice John Major wrote in the decision: "The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care."
And so a slow process has begun in the provinces:
"The largest impact of the decision has been to change the consensus on whether or not the health care system is sustainable. It has changed the consensus on whether it's even just," said Brett Skinner, director of pharmaceutical-policy research at the Fraser Institute, an independent research organization in Canada.
"There's an evolutionary change that's under way that will be incremental, year over year — a slow expansion of private options, and the development of private insurance for those things," said Mr. Skinner.
And then there's
this.
