It was incompetence, not COVID-19.COVID-19 was not the relentless killing machine we were told to expect, which is not surprising..What is surprising is it didn’t kill the faith Canadians have in their public healthcare monopoly. In the real world — a free market world — Canadian medicare would have died a terrible, embarrassing, and very quick death long before COVID ever came along..The system may be expensive, but it does poor work..Elective surgeries — such as mastectomies for breast cancer, donations of kidneys by a living donor and even brain tumours being removed — is a misleading term at best. If one person elects to have a dangerous brain tumour removed and a corresponding doctor agrees to remove it, that should be the end of the conversation. Instead, so-called “elective” surgeries were postponed by bureaucratic decree, many permanently because those patients did not live to survive COVID lockdowns..ICU’s were overcrowded for the entirety of the COVID pandemic, which is not surprising because they were overcrowded before COVID also. For decades, every jurisdiction in Canada has appealed to every level of government for funding to increase hospital beds. There has been no instance ever when unions and lobbyists and the special interests of public healthcare have not been constantly clamouring at the gates for their pound of flesh, which is already among the largest in the developed world. The Canadian Institute for Health Information website claims that total health spending in Canada is expected to reach $308 billion for 2021, or $8,019 per person, $32,076 for a family of four..A top hat, a moustache, and bags of money..Imagine any other business acting like this? Nobody waits in line for poorly made products and bad service with a $8,019 price tag. They simply take their business somewhere else..The idea of a monopoly generally conjures up images of businessmen in fine suits, lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills, and laughing about the suckers they ripped off, but this reputation is undeserved. In the marketplace it’s too easy to put the competition under by supplying better service, a better price, innovating, and providing value. Without the strong arm of the state, a monopoly is almost impossible. Bad actors are punished. Those who provide what the market wants are rewarded. However, in a state-run monopoly, like the Soviets had over the supply of bread, or like the kind that the government has over health insurance in Canada, quality drops and prices rise. The mechanisms to increase wealth in that kind of system are graft and corruption..So, when politicians lock down the economy, dollar signs begin to roll through the eyes of the special interests and citizens continue to starve and freeze in the breadlines of Canadian healthcare..The Conservative Party of crickets..It seems ridiculous that once that pound of flesh is squandered aimlessly, the medical establishment be rewarded with additional funding, which is always the pinnacle of creative solutions among the political minds and policy wonks in Ottawa. And be sure, it is squandered aimlessly, the proof is itself in the shortage of hospital beds and the unavailability of “elective” yet life saving surgeries with or without Covid..Why is the obvious not being said? Are the Conservatives not in the middle of a leadership contest? How they love to rail against price controls and barriers to entry and speak in platitudes about their love of the free market, but not one of them has the guts to say what needs to be said about Canadian healthcare — the truth — which is it’s incompetence, not COVID that causes strain on the healthcare system, and it’s been going on for a long time. Canada’s third rail has diminished a necessary conversation about waste and accountability into feeble proposals to tinker with Canadian health transfer payments and vague ramblings about “support” for nurses..Privatize it!.To be fair, there are plenty of good doctors and nurses and caring staff in the healthcare industry, but when a system has such absolute power, the kind in which it decides who lives and dies and whose livelihoods are essential or not, that type of absolute power — as Lord Acton would say — corrupts absolutely. Incompetence is only a symptom. Those same good doctors and nurses and caring staff would be better served under a banner of entrepreneurship and industry..The solution for healthcare will never be found in increased spending because the problems in Canadian healthcare are the problems inherent in any socialist system..COVID only made this obvious..Darcy Gerow is a columnist for the Western Standard
