Open medicare to private services: doctors

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Open medicare to private services: doctors
Canadian Medical Association wants feds to establish strict guidelines, limiting time Canadians wait for medical treatment

By Daniel McHardie, Canada East

August 21, 2003

The Canadian Medical Association is joining a Supreme Court of Canada challenge to help reduce waiting lines and guarantee care for Canadians.

The country's largest medical association is arguing Canadians deserve health-care treatment in a timely fashion and, if that can't be found in their home province, it is incumbent on governments to pay for them to go elsewhere.

Dr. Dana Hanson, the CMA’s president, said the country’s largest physicians association fully supports the universal medicare program but believes firm care guarantees must be imposed nationally.

Hanson wants governments to establish strict guidelines, through clinically-proven data, that citizens can only wait for a certain period of time before treatment must be administered and if a specific deadline is missed a government is forced to send the patient outside its borders without charge.

"It depends on the condition how long that may be, but it would not be based on the individual decision by the minister whether he says yes or no a patient could go or not, but it would be based on specific criteria," Hanson said.

Informal care guarantees aren’t foreign in New Brunswick. The provincial government sends New Brunswickers out of province and, in some cases, into the United States to receive care if local waitlists are too lengthy.

Before the Conservative government called the June election it introduced legislation making way for a Health Charter of Rights and Responsibilities that guaranteed patients "a right of timely access to health care services." However the rights were never defined as the proposed legislation was sent to committee for public discussion and it died when the election was launched.

Health and Wellness Minister Elvy Robichaud said it is still the government’s intention to put the health charter out of public debate and find out what wait limits are reasonable. The health minister said the rights guaranteed under the proposed charter should meet the requests of the Canadian Medical Association, especially considering how the province already ships patients to other jurisdictions when lines are too long.

"It is paid by the public, through a public financed system but it’s not a two-tiered system," Robichaud said.

This process is not moving toward a private system, according to the health minister but one is being advocated in the upcoming Supreme Court case the doctors’ group is joining.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case filed by Quebec doctor Jacques Chaoulli and his elderly patient George Zeliotis, who are challenging medicare’s monopoly. The two argue patients have a right to private health care, which is being violated as waiting lists grow longer.

Zeliotis has said he had to wait months in tremendous pain for a hip replacement through the Quebec health system.He wants laws prohibiting doctors from providing private services in public hospitals and bar Quebec residents from buying private insurance to cover services that are already administered by the publicly funded system overturned.

The Canadian Medical Association president said the association does not want a private system, but there is a larger issue of care guarantees. While provinces like New Brunswick are looking at care guarantees, Hanson said he’d like the federal government to establish the Canadian Health Council that would set up the timelines for guaranteed service.

Setting up a health council was a recommendation in Roy Romanow’s royal commission on health care but the former Saskatchewan premier’s concept is receiving a rough ride from provincial leaders who oppose federal intrusion in health care.