Brett Skinner is the Director of Pharmaceutical & Heath Policy Research from the Fraser Institute. He spoke at Peter Jaworski’s Liberty Summer Seminar and gave an interesting talk on a current issue that should contain a lot more facts in the place of a failed ideology.
Healthcare is a perennial issue in Canadian elections and while the Liberal Party merely points to another party and says “not like them”, they do not propose any fresh ideas for providing service to Canadians.
As Brett muses, the opponents of liberty in healthcare (the Liberals) do not care about the viability of the public system. They instead care about equalitarian socialism. For Canadians living under this government however, this has little to do with the delivery of a high quality service to Canadians.
Now, to be fair, at an earlier speech to the Fraser Institute, Stephen Harper surprised some by declaring that the Conservative Party of Canada would not be changing the current overall system to include a private tier. Harper attributed this decision to an overwhelming Canadian aversion to changing healthcare in such a way.
However, this came before the Chaoulli SCC decision, and perhaps some experimentation by a few provincial governments will begin to turn the tide.
Did you know that the average age of a hospital in Canada is 40 years while the average age of an American hospital is 9 years?
Did you know that Canada delays the approval of certain drugs by about six months in order to wait for the price of a newly released drug to fall to a comfortable level for the Canadian government?
The healthcare debate in this country is a contentious one and the talking points often fall along ideological lines. If we are to fix an unsustainable system however, we need to measure the benefit of an egalitarian socialism where we pay more and get less against another system of delivery.
The Fraser Institute asks important questions and answers many of them in a way that goes against the grain of the current stagnant mindset. If you ever wanted to understand the private side of the healthcare debate beyond the superficial and demonizing Liberal talking points, I’d encourage you to listen to Brett Skinner (even if you are a public system proponent) and try to keep an open mind to the facts.
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