Two major problems plague our health care

A May 25 letter suggested that “we simply, in a totally public system, cannot pay the finances required to obtain the specialists and modern equipment required.”

One must ask how adding the overhead of executive salaries, marketing and redundant administrative costs of a privatized system onto the costs of specialists and modern equipment would make these specialists and that equipment more affordable.

Another letter the same day suggested a progressive payment scheme in which affluent people would pay “the full cost” of medical treatment and less affluent people’s treatment would be paid for with public money.

Since even affluent people would have difficulty paying “the full cost” of medical treatment, one assumes that enterprising insurance companies, as in the U.S., would fill the void with policies that would drain health-care dollars from the pockets of affluent people into those of insurance company executives, marketing departments and redundant administrative organizations.

The suggestion of a progressive health-care funding plan, preferably where multibillion-dollar corporations pay the lion’s share, smaller companies pay progressively less, and individuals pay progressively even less into the public purse — as now — and every dollar paid in is spent on training, staffing, compensation and medical infrastructure and equipment is an excellent idea.

Two problems plague our erstwhile envy-of-the-world health-care system.

First, in the name of “flexibility” — a weasel-word for dumping federal costs onto junior governments — the FederalProvincial Fiscal Arrangements and Established Programs Financing Act of 1977 threw out the 50-50 cost sharing arrangement mandated by the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act of 1957 and Medical Care Act of 1966 and replaced it with a complicated scheme that boils down to inadequate funding.

The “flexibility” that resulted is a euphemism for medically ill-advised cuts based not on medical necessity but on too little money to continue delivering the truly remarkable health care Canadians and the medical professionals who delivered it previously enjoyed.

Second, one in five dollars spent in B.C. is spent on rent, and the operating profit margin of the real estate rental and leasing sector is more than 45 per cent, dwarfing all other sectors of B.C.’s economy. Canadian homeowner mortgages amount to more than Canada’s GDP.

This plunder of the productive economy of B.C. by rent-seekers, and the enormous share of B.C.’s GDP that homeowners are paying to service their mortgage debt, is justified by appeals to “Economics 101: Supply and Demand” while conveniently overlooking the destructive effects on society of economic rent extraction (profit in no way limited by costs), which the defunding of B.C.’s health-care system epitomizes.

Bill Appledorf Victoria