Canada’s Supreme Court sanctions drive to dismantle public health care

[undeterred]

By Keith Jones WSWS
11 June 2005

Canada’s Supreme Court has provided big business and the political right with the battering-ram they have long sought to dismantle the country’s universal public health-care system, Medicare. By a margin of 4 to 3, the country’s highest court has struck down a Quebec law that prohibits private health insurers from providing coverage for medically necessary services available through the state-funded public health insurance system.

The plaintiffs, anti-Medicare activist Dr. Jacques Chaoulli and his patient, George Zeliotis, argued that the prohibition on private insurance violated Zeliotis’s constitutional right to security of person because he was forced to endure a painful, nearly year-long wait before undergoing hip surgery. Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling overturned two lower court judgments. The lower courts had found that while Zelliotis’s individual rights were curtailed, this was acceptable because the prohibition helped ensure a greater collective good—the viability of a public health care system that provides health care to all, not just those with the means to pay for private health care.

The Supreme Court majority justified their decision by pointing to the lengthy waiting lists that now exist in Quebec and most parts of Canada for necessary and even potentially life-saving medical procedures and to the failure of governments to address this problem, although it has persisted for years. Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and two other of the four judges who voted to strike down the Quebec law declared: “The evidence in this case shows that delays in the public health-care system are widespread, and that, in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.”

Like hospital emergency ward overcrowding and the pandemic of super-bugs in Canadian hospitals, lengthy waiting-lists are the result of a decade and a half of federal and provincial budget cuts and chronic under-funding of health services. But the judges refrained from noting the obvious, but essential point: Those arguing most vociferously for a “right” to buy private health insurance are precisely those who pressed for governments to massively reduce spending on public and social services and to cut corporate and personal income taxes in the name of ensuring the “competitiveness”—i.e., the profitability—of Canadian business.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/medi-j11.shtml

[acmejack]

1. Just another in a long string of corporatist victories as of late.

If it is beneficial to citizens and deprives "business" of the chance to wring profit from said citizenry, it must be eliminated.