Letter to the editor... Is Canada’s healthcare system truly universal?

Editor:

Especially during the pandemic crisis, I’ve heard too many platitudinous praises of Canada’s supposed universality of healthcare.

I, one who champions truly comprehensive health-services coverage, had tried accessing, for example, essential therapy coverage in our public system; within, however, there were/are important health treatments that are either universally non-existent or, more likely, universally inaccessible, except to those with relatively high incomes and/or generous employer health insurance coverage.

Furthermore, Canada is the only universal-health-coverage country (theoretically, anyway) that doesn’t also cover medication.

The bitter irony is, many low-income outpatients cannot afford to fill their prescriptions and resultantly end up back in the hospital system, thus burdening the system far more than if the outpatients’ generic-brand medication was also covered. This lesson was learned and implemented by enlightened European nations with genuinely universal all-inclusive health care systems that also cover necessary medication.

Why Canada has, to date, steadfastly refused to similarly do so, I know not.

But I do know that the only two health professions’ appointments for which I’m fully covered by the public health plan are the readily pharmaceuticalprescribing psychiatry and general practitioner health professions. Such non-Big-Pharma-benefiting health specialists as dentists, counsellors, therapists and naturopaths (etcetera) are not covered.

Frank Sterle Jr.

White Rock, B.C.