The Joys of National Health Care

Our neighbor to the north has a government monopoly system of health care. In Canada you are not allowed to spend your own money on health care.

But Jacques Chaoulli, a French Canadian physician decided to challenge that, according to Anthony Dick. He argued in court that it was illegal to refuse medical care by putting people on waiting lists and at the same time to prevent people from seeking their own remedy by paying for needed medical procedures out of their own pockets.

Eventually, the Canadian Supreme Court agreed.

The question is, however, why ordinary people are so enamoured of a system that denies them the right to spend their own money to save their lives if the state won’t do it for them? Dick wonders about this too. The Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper recently went out of his way to argue against any private provision of health care.

“There will be no private, parallel system,” he recently promised at a rally in Winnipeg.

This longstanding hostility to private health-care alternatives cannot be explained away simply by noting that most Canadians have bought into the Left’s premise that taxpayers have an obligation to pick up the hospital bills of every citizen who ever gets sick. Something further is required to explain why some Canadians think sick people should be actively prevented from using their own money to purchase health care from private companies that deliver service better and faster than the government.

I believe that the reason is a dark and shameful one. People like the moral and financial cop-out of government health care. That way they never have to make the decision to spend their entire savings on a medical procedure to stay alive. They can just submit to the government system, and avoid the moral decision: Is my life worth more than my money? (Or is Aunt Millie’s life worth more than my money?)
The French Canadian movie The Barbarian Invasions takes a brilliant look at this moral universe.

It should not be surprising that people want to escape difficult decisions. We are human, after all. But should we really live in a society that forbids people from spending their own money on lifesaving medical procedures? What, as the left likes to say, does that say about us and about our society?