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The Canadian Supreme Court’s decision was the outcome of a lonely and
courageous struggle conducted at great personal cost in time and money
by a Canadian physician, Dr. Jacques Chaoulli. Dr. Chaoulli went to
court with the case of a chemical salesman who had been forced to wait
a year for a hip replacement and who at the same time was prohibited
from paying for private surgery. As described in
an earlier Times article, Dr. Chaoulli argued
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that regulations that create long waiting times for surgery
contradict the constitutional guarantees for individuals of “life,
liberty and the security of the person,’' and that the prohibition
against private medical insurance and care is for sick patients an
“infringement of the protection against cruel and unusual
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To most Americans it may come as something of a shock simply to learn
that all is not well with health care in Canada. That’s because
Canada’s system has continuously been held up as the model for the
United States to follow. Sometimes it seems that every ignoramus with
a graduate-school diploma is ready to pontificate on how wonderful
medical care is north of the border and that to solve our problems
with medical care, all we need do is adopt that wonderful,
single-payer Canadian system.
I could stop here, with
the satisfaction of conveying knowledge that the system of socialized
medical care in Canada is in fact so unwell that the door to its
replacement with private medical care has been opened. But there is a
deeper point I want to make, which will help to establish why
socialized medicine is a profoundly evil and immoral system, that
should never be implemented anywhere.
And this is the fact that
the prohibition of private medical care that has existed in Canada is
not some inexplicable accident but, on the contrary, follows logically
from the very nature of socialized medicine. The connection is this:
Socialized medicine is advocated as the means of making medical
care free or almost free, thereby enabling even the very poorest
people to afford all of it that they need. Unfortunately, when
medical care is made free, the quantity of it that people attempt
to consume becomes virtually limitless. Office visits, diagnostic
tests, procedures, hospitalizations, and surgeries all balloon. If
nothing further were done, the cost would destroy the government’s
budget. Something further is done, and that is that cost controls
are imposed. The government simply draws the line on how much it
is willing to spend. But so long as nothing limits the office
visits, requests for diagnostic tests, etc., etc., waiting lines
and waiting lists grow longer and longer.
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