Several days ago Don C. Brunell, from the Association of Washington Business, published a piece on health care “reform” in The Daily World whose basic argument was — wait.

“Acting too quickly causes major problems later,” Brunell wrote. “President Obama wants Congress to rush health reform legislation, implying that the ‘crisis’ means there is no time to analyze the details. That would be a monumental mistake. Here is what the President and Congress should do. First, slow down.”

That argument might hold some weight if the discussion concerning health care had only started with Obama’s inauguration, or even with the disgraceful Clinton’s attempted giveaway to the big insurance companies 15 years ago. Maybe we could even stretch credibility by claiming that the 40 years since Lyndon Johnson or the 60 years that have elapsed since Harry Truman attempted to initiate health care as a right in the late ’40s was moving too fast.

But really, is 70 years of discussion moving too fast? That’s how long it’s been since President Roosevelt attempt to include single-payer health coverage for all citizens as part of the Social Security system. As Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter From Birmingham Jail in the mid-’60s in the midst of another struggle for human rights, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear … with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’ … There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”

Have we yet reached that point waiting for a humane health care system, that point when endurance runs over? Surely the families of the 23,000 people who die every year because they have no health insurance have reached that point. Surely the people who go bankrupt every year — 50 percent of all bankruptcies — because they have a health care emergency have reached the point where endurance runs over. (By the way, 75 percent of those families who go bankrupt had insurance. They had insurance until they needed it then they no longer had it. It’s only when you get sick and actually have to use your insurance that people find out the dark side of the so-called insurance policies they have. For many sick people, their insurance companies simply cut them off.

Just how long are we going to have to wait until our representatives establish a single-payer system in this country; a system based on the successes of the 29 other industrial countries who adopted single-payer decades ago?

“We the People,” the three magnificent words that open the Constitution of the United States. It does not begin, we the insurance companies, or we the lobbyists, or we the campaign financiers — We the People. That document goes on to explain that our government was established to “promote the general welfare.”

You call the Canadian healthcare system broken. Can you elaborate on how it is broken and where the problem is?

You have to look at it from the eyes of the patient, and that's when you realize how dysfunctional the system really is. It starts with an individual who says, "I think I have a problem." More than 1.2-million Canadians in 2003 could not find a regular family doctor.

If you get into the doctor's office, on average, you can expect to wait over nine weeks to see a specialist. You can wait for ten weeks for MRI machines, nearly five weeks for CT scans, nearly four weeks for ultrasounds.

The diagnoses with the specialists take an incredible amount of time. Once you go to the specialist, there's a second queue that you have to go through to go to the operating room. On average, it is over nine weeks, but it can stretch into months or even years for some patients.

By the time you actually get the surgery, you often end up getting lower health care than what is available in other nations, because of the way we're delivering health care. All along, the patient has not received the healthcare from a system that is really world-class as we are told.

If you look at it from a pluralist perspective, this system has been treating a patient terribly and perhaps inhumanely in delivering their care, does a reasonably good job at saving their life; not a great one, but a reasonably good one, this system is the developed world's third most expensive universal-access healthcare program.

We have one of the most expensive universal-access healthcare systems in the world, yet we deliver some of the worst access to healthcare, technology, to physicians in the world. That is a broken system.


Would you base the healthcare system on a different model that is in place in other countries?

It's not about adopting a model or adopting a different model; it's about adopting the right policies, those policies that have been proven to improve universal-access healthcare systems that have been proven to allow a population, to allow a group of individuals to better deliver the promise of universal access to healthcare.

It's a promise that we are not fulfilling in Canada; it has been shown that cost-sharing is very important in the universal-access healthcare program. Having patients share the cost of the care they receive. Private competition in the delivery of publicly-funded and publicly-guaranteed services is important to ensure that you're getting the most care for your dollar and the best bang for the buck.

Competition in the finance area, allowing patients to pay privately if they choose to do so, also means you get better care for the dollar and the best bang for the buck in healthcare than you would otherwise.

We have, in Canada, chosen the wrong policies in these areas, and we need to begin emulating all of those nations, all of the world's most successful universal healthcare programs, all nine of them who have taken these policies and implemented them into the healthcare program, to the benefit of patients.

Would you base the healthcare system on a different model that is in place in other countries?

It's not about adopting a model or adopting a different model; it's about adopting the right policies, those policies that have been proven to improve universal-access healthcare systems that have been proven to allow a population, to allow a group of individuals to better deliver the promise of universal access to healthcare.

It's a promise that we are not fulfilling in Canada; it has been shown that cost-sharing is very important in the universal-access healthcare program. Having patients share the cost of the care they receive. Private competition in the delivery of publicly-funded and publicly-guaranteed services is important to ensure that you're getting the most care for your dollar and the best bang for the buck.

Competition in the finance area, allowing patients to pay privately if they choose to do so, also means you get better care for the dollar and the best bang for the buck in healthcare than you would otherwise.

We have, in Canada, chosen the wrong policies in these areas, and we need to begin emulating all of those nations, all of the world's most successful universal healthcare programs, all nine of them who have taken these policies and implemented them into the healthcare program, to the benefit of patients.

"Just how long are we going to have to wait until our representatives establish a single-payer system in this country; a system based on the successes of the 29 other industrial countries who adopted single-payer decades ago?"