Fighting Healthcare Privatization

In this episode we begin a dive into the underfunding and privatization threats facing Canada’s Public Healthcare system, with Natalie Mehra from the Ontario Health Coalition. While a majority of Canadians continue to view Medicare a defining feature of our national identity, others are losing patience with a system bogged down by a series of aggravating chronic problems including:

• a crisis in access to family doctors;
• the “hallway medicine” of our emergency departments, and
• long waiting lists for specialist appointments and surgical procedures Privatization, in one form or another, is being sold to us by provincial governments as a means to address the pressures on the public system without, they claim, undermining its core principles. Privatization critics, on the other hand, argue that the increasing presence of for-profit providers inevitably leads to a two-tiered system that rations access on the basis of ability to pay. This is the first of a planned series looking at the various kinds of privatization facing Canada’s Medicare System.