Enforced Suffering Is Wrong

On Tuesday, Alberta Health Minister Tyler Shandro introduced the province’s plan to reduce wait times by increasing the use of private facilities for publicly funded surgeries, and as expected, the very notion of the words “health care” and “private” existing in close proximity to each other has caused concern. The leader of the lobby group Friends of Medicare, Sandra Azocar, issued a press release complaining, “We don’t need private solutions to public problems like wait times.” And Alberta’s opposition leader, Rachel Notley, said Albertans “don’t need to be continuously relitigating the value of public health care.”

All right, if I were to detail my personal bias on the issue, it would take half the column, but suffice it to say that when I worked as executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation several years ago, I was wholeheartedly supportive of a constitutional challenge of the B.C. health-care act (the trial of which finally wrapped up last month after a decade of litigation) because I truly believe patients should be permitted to pay for health care if they choose to — especially when the government cannot provide it.

Or to put it another way, offering government funding for everyone doesn’t have to entail barring anyone from opting to pay for themselves, especially if they are suffering. It would be fantastic if our provinces could provide truly timely surgery for every patient who needs it, but until that happens, it strikes me as unconscionable to insist that a patient who’s waiting, in pain and with a diminishing capacity to live a full life, be legally compelled to suffer for the sake of an ideal of a purely public health-care system.

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