Medicare still a Canadian priority
By James Clancy
"When you refuse to see things as they are, nothing is so mystifying as the obvious."
- Macaulay
Two things you will never hear a true Canadian say: Our summers are too long and Medicare was a bad idea. Yet the medicare minuet is about to swirl into Vancouver for another extravagant exercise in manifestly missing the point.
The truth will again be found to be inconvenient and incompatible with all the hidden agendas, ideology and jurisdictional power struggles but nicely layered over with the guano of "expert" evidence.
The truth is almost all of us have always liked medicare, while almost none of us have never liked it. Yet we are saddled with the Great Medicare Debate. How can that be? We live in a democracy. We are citizens in a nation where the will of the people is paramount. How is it that we can be so long denied something we like
and want so much? Who is doing this to us and why?
Clearly it is not us. We, the everyday people, aren't making an issue out of medicare. We already did that. It is how we got medicare to begin with. Elections were won and lost on this issue until the politicians got the message and we got what we wanted: a medical care plan that covered every Canadian citizen, everywhere
in Canada, no matter what we suffered from and no matter how much money we had in our wallets.
We also were determined that no one should ever get rich from the pain and suffering of others. Medical care in Canada would not be a cash-and-carry, for-profit private enterprise. We knew the simple truth that one person's health was not worth more than another person's health. We decided to use our tax money to pay for
it all.
Medical care was our priority, often our top priority. It was the best hedge we could provide to ourselves against life's unending uncertainties. We knew that without our health, we had nothing. With it, we always had a chance.
So we got our medicare. It worked well for a long time. Now the politicians are telling us it can't last. Not without changing it. Not without changing it beyond all recognition. Not without making it not medicare. Not without disregarding and dismissing the will of the people.
So the armies of actuaries, squads of statisticians and platoons of policy analysts in Vancouver will do us no good. Because the heart of the Great Medicare Debate is not about the provision of medical care at all. It is, first and last, about responding to the will of the people. It is about democracy.
Medicare was, in its original principles, as full a manifestation of the will of the Canadian people as ever there was. There is no reason to believe it is not still.
There will be no resolution to the Great Medicare Debate until our elected leaders acknowledge and accept that reality, no matter how disturbing it is to their big-money friends.
Politicians must stop trying to talk us out of what we like and want. We like and want medicare. We like it as it was. We want more of it beginning with a national pharmacare plan and full coverage of home care.
We are neither children nor fools. We were not when we invented medicare, made it a top priority and paid for it all. We are not now.
We know there must be compromises. We know we must be "realistic." But, we also know we are the ones who, in the end, pay the freight for everything. Given all that, our first choice still is to reclaim and expand medicare. Yet, this is the one option governments never consider.
So, history repeats itself. Governments were not on our side the first time, either. They refused to consider a universal publicly funded system of medical care until we forced them to create medicare for us. This reality should give us strength and point the way to our future.
We must not let the talk, talk, talkers grind us down. We must not let the shills and shamans of private enterprise sway us with flash talk of better service if only they can make a buck out of it.
The lesson of our history is plain enough: We must not allow ourselves to be talked out of what we like, need and want. We must hold out for ourselves. We must hold out for democracy. We must hold out for our kind of medicare.
The task has never been more formidable. The need has never been greater.
It will take the effort of each of us. I know we're up to it. It's not as if we haven't done it before.
James Clancy is the president of the National Union of Public and General Employees.
