Canadians in fight of their lives to save medicare

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/11/2005 (7352 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ON the eve of a federal election, Canadians have been given notice they are in the fight of their lives to save their most treasured national social program from the privatizers. Alberta and Quebec have announced they are exploring ways to bring the private sector into the delivery of health care. Premier Ralph Klein got a thumbs-up this week from Conservative leader Stephen Harper. “His response is that’s fine,” Klein told reporters in Ottawa Monday. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberals, fearful of ruffling provincial feathers, especially in Quebec, have fallen silent on the medicare file.

If the shifting political winds aren’t worrying enough, a high-powered anti-medicare conference, euphemistically named Saving Medicare — Strategies and Solutions was held in Vancouver earlier this month. Sponsored by the Canadian Independent Medical Clinics Association, it featured the Who’s Who of medicare’s foes from Canada, the U.S., Europe, Britain and New Zealand.

Guests included former Reform party leader Preston Manning, Liberal Senator Michael Kirby, scions of the right-wing Fraser Institute like Gordon Gibson and Sally Pipes and privatization gurus from England, Europe, New Zealand and Sweden.

The conference’s tone indicated the privatizers now feel so confident that the tide is turning in their favour, they no longer bother to hide their agenda. They intend to bury universal public health care; not just impose American-style medicine, but use American insurance and health multinationals to do it.

The language in the CIMCA conference brochure is raw, direct and speaks for itself:

“A whole new range of finance and insurance products will be developed. Learn what lies ahead if private health insurance for all Canadians becomes a reality. How will you advise clients wishing to pursue private health opportunities? What does (the Supreme Court decision opening the door to a parallel, private-for profit health insurance system in Quebec and eventually Canada) mean for Canadians and what does it mean for your business?

“An economic boom? With the prospect of $40 billion of new non government funding being directed into health-care delivery in Canada each year, and with the potential for Canada to participate in and benefit from the $1.6 trillion U.S. health system, might we witness the biggest stimulus that Canada’s economy has ever seen?”

The conference was billed by The Medical Post as “another pivotal moment in Canadian history.” With registration fees between $1,154.53 and $1,282.93, it was pitched to a small, select elite: lawyers, doctors, economists, insurance executives, financial planners, investment advisors and top health and health policy bureaucrats.

Significantly, the Toronto Star was the only major newspaper to cover the event, sending its national affairs writer, Tom Walkom. The guests spoke freely and Walkom reported them all.

Tom Sackville, former junior health minister in Britain’s last Conservative government and now chief executive of the International Federation of Health Plans and a global lobbyist for the insurance industry, called Canadians who support medicare “guilty of something close to criminal negligence.”

Pipes, former Fraser Institute alumna, now head of San Francisco’s right-wing Pacific Research Institute, said “there’s a war out there and we have to win.” She wants medicare axed immediately and in its entirety.

“Tommy Douglas (Saskatchewan’s first CCF premier and the man credited with founding medicare) did us a great disservice,” she said to applause.

“Don’t let the dark side take the initiative again,” added Johan Hjertqvist, a health consultant from Sweden.

After the ideology came the strategy for overcoming lingering public resistance. Charles Auld, former head of General Healthcare Group, Britain’s largest private hospital chain, dismissed medicare’s supporters as “tree huggers.” He advocated a two-pronged approach to selling private medicine: present it as a partnership designed to strengthen medicare and label all medicare supporters as reactionaries. “Draw the teeth from the unions,” he said. “Paint them as the voice of vested interests.”

But it was Manning’s proposal that topped them all with its detail and audacity. Canadians love compromise, he said, so portray privatization as a compromise. Advocates of two-tier health care are always painted as extremists while medicare’s champions are seen as moderates. Turn the tables, he continued. Paint the extremist as the moderate and visa versa.

Winning the language battle is vital. To make it sound like it falls between the two ideological poles of Canadian medicare on the left and American private, for-profit health care on the right, Manning, borrowing a phrase from Ralph Klein’s lexicon, proposed that two-tier medicine be dubbed the “third option.” Once the rebranding is embedded in public consciousness, other two-tier systems, as in Britain, Australia or France, can be made to seem moderate.

Manning didn’t mention the well-documented fact that these so-called superior examples all have waiting lists as long if not longer than Canada’s. For the privatizers, the real issue has never been waiting lists. Waiting lists are merely their weapon. Their real issue is the affront to the affluent posed by the fact Canada’s universal system prevents private wealth from buying access to superior care and investing in lucrative business opportunities.

Manning’s privatization prescription borrows a leaf straight from the U.S. right — political action committees, or PACs, supposedly non-partisan citizen groups who actually front for special, and often highly-political, interests. Politicians won’t move, he said, until the public pushes them. And pushing the public will require a lot of money.

Pro-privatization organizations must unite to create one powerful, non-partisan single-issue movement to lobby the public using all the tools of the trade, hiring experienced political operatives, fundraisers and pollsters and choosing the most vulnerable targets and effective spokespeople. He suggested the latter be patients with wait-time horror stories.

Added Bruce Davidson, director of a New Zealand private insurance company: “Get a good story; sing a good song; keep it consistent.”

Once the war for the hearts and minds of Canadians is over, Manning would then move to his penultimate goal: to dismantle medicare and turn all federal health dollars into new tax room for the provinces.

FrancesRussell@MTS.net