Film at Eleven

On the heel's of last night's entry about the apparent lack of decent investigative journalism in Canada, I was reminded today of Aaron Derfel's excellent reporting for the Gazette this February about the state of - you guessed it! - private health care in Quebec.

With regard to his reporting, Derfel makes clear something that may not be as obvious as it should: the mere opening of private clinics (in Quebec or elsewhere) doesn't really take the strain off of public health care in Canada. While we do need more MRI machines, we do not need radiologists abandoning the publicly-funded kind for the expensive variety reserved for, in Derfel's words, "queue-jumpers." (Why is English Canadian journalism so full of Britishisms?)

If two-tier care is the way to go in this country, let's be upfront about it. The gist of Derfel's series is that private care can prosper in Quebec because Ottawa's finest lack the courage to shut it down. In so doing, they're paving the way for private care in the rest of the country (though you get the feeling that, if only because it can really afford it, Alberta is just dying to jump the queue, as I suppose I should say) and allowing the public system to atrophy and fester along the way.

If we are ultimately to reject private health care, Ottaw ought to enforce the Canada Health Act as strongly as possible, put Quebec in its place (setting an altogether different example) and find a real solution.