Universal health care as we know it on its deathbed

I wonder if the Ghost of Health Care Past is haunting Justin Trudeau and Canadian premiers as they try to sleep at night.

The Ghosts of Health Care Present and Future are certainly haunting them now. And the rest of us, too.

I can almost hear the chains of Tommy Douglas rattling around hospitals and GP waiting rooms, haunting everyone like Jacob Marley’s chains that followed Ebenezer Scrooge in the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol.

I don’t want to pronounce health care dead, but if it isn’t quite, it’s on life support.

Douglas, the father of Canada’s health-care system, brought the first publicly funded system to Saskatchewan in 1962. A national program was introduced by Lester B. Pearson in 1966.

Canadians, after the hardships of the Depression, were happy to have publicly funded health care. They embraced the system as part of the Canadian identity, a bit like hockey.

And here we are in 2023 struggling with a depleted system swamped by demand, under-resourced and trying to stave off total collapse.

I wonder what Douglas and other architects of universal health care would think. I suppose it doesn’t matter. They’re all dead, like Marley.

And the politicians are like Scrooge, looking backward and forward, trying to come up with fixes for a broken health-care dream.

Trudeau’s Liberals are committing $196 billion in health-care transfers over the next decade to help provinces deliver services.

But the money is not enough, say the provinces. There are strings attached, say the feds. Just do something and leave the politics out of it, say most Canadians.

Right now, six million Canadians do not have a family doctor. That is one in six. In Nova Scotia, that number is 130,000, or about 13 per cent of the population of just over a million.

Emergency rooms are crammed with people who are injured, suffering chronic medical conditions or need prescription renewals because they don’t have family doctors. Walk-in clinics are also jammed with long lines that form hours before they open their doors.

Hospital beds are occupied by seniors awaiting places in long-term care. There aren’t enough nurses in the system, leading to burnout and nurses leaving the profession in droves.

Nurses in the Halifax emergency department are so concerned about what they are seeing on the frontlines that they wrote a letter to Premier Tim Houston, warning about the “unravelling” of health care and the “brain drain” of registered nurses.

The nurses — the ones we called “heroes” during the height of the pandemic — are burned out and crying foul because the private travel nurse program is paying its workers double the amount public nurses receive for the exact same work.

Is it any wonder public nurses are fleeing their jobs to work for these agencies?

The emergency nurses are practically begging the provincial government to create better financial incentives to attract and retain public nurses. They want higher wages, bonuses and working conditions that support a better work-life balance.

Houston says the federal health-care increase would mean another billion for health care in Nova Scotia over the next 10 years. This year alone, it would amount to another $154 million for the province.

This money certainly can’t hurt. Maybe some of it might be used to incentivize public nurses before they disappear altogether.

Right now the federal government is demanding this money be used to shore up primary care, reduce waiting times and improve mental health services. They also want provinces to share more data and digitize patient records.

The funding is a stopgap measure. It will not fix health care. Universal health care as envisaged by Douglas 60 years ago is on its deathbed.

Politicians and all Canadians will have to face up to this reality and come up with a whole new model to deliver health care.

Otherwise, the system will continue to creak and deteriorate, and the Canadian standard of living will decline.