Mail about health care

Mail from listeners about our hour-long special "Life Support -- Medicare's Midlife Crisis", on our program on September 27m 2915.

John Foster, Ottawa:

Thank you for the depth and extent of your Sunday morning treatment. The discussion with Flood and Picard was illuminating and pointed. This programme should be delivered at every front door in Canada: before the election.

Robert Minty in Abbotsford, B.C.

After listening to your program, I have concluded that it is not the federal goverment's fault that our cherished healthcare system is in jeopardy. Rather it is the fault of an electorate that continues to support political parties that do little or nothing to improve the healthcare system Canadians are so proud of. Your guests succinctly exposed the myths and shortcomings, and potential threats to medicare -- particularly the various free trade agreements now being hammered out. Our Medicare system could do so much more to enhance the lives of Canadians, but that will only happen if the citizens of this country demand it. A well-informed citizen, is a politician's nightmare."

John Olsen, Parksville, B.C.

I was honoured to work with "Saint" Tommy -- Tommy Douglas -- when he moved from Regina to run for a federal seat in B.C.  He was masterful in challenging and disconcerting his opponents. I believe when he transferred from provincial to federal politics, he was very concerned about the survival of his public health care initiative. He lamented the absence of dental care, and strongly disagreed with his successor's abandonment of the  issue of salaried physicians. I am deeply disappointed in the NDP's failure to raise the issue in any significant way. As for the Harper gang, their neglect of the issue -- along with their unilateral abandonment of the Health Accord -- is one more mighty shove of Canada into the toxic embrace of American culture.

Geoffrey Mynett, Vancouver:

Dear Michael Enright,
In your interesting discussion about Medicare on the Sunday Edition of September 27 you referred to Tommy Douglas as "Saint Tommy."  Tommy Douglas is usually credited as being the Father of Canadian Medicare, as indeed he was. But he was not the only father.  We should not forget all those who fought for public health care before him.
In the decades before Douglas's 1946 Saskatchewan health legislation there were many attempts to promote and enact health care schemes in Canada, most or all of which, alas, foundered.  Public health care aroused much passion and much debate, then as now.

From 1914 on there had been a rising tide of agitation for health insurance of some form or other in Canada, nowhere more so perhaps than in British Columbia. Major J.W. McIntosh, for example, had been promoting health insurance in the British Columbia legislature for some years before the establishment of the first commission to study it in 1919.  In 1928 Dr. Horace Wrinch, Liberal member for Skeena, introduced a private members bill in the BC Legislature that led to the 1929 Royal Commission that in turn led to the Health Insurance Act of British Columbia of 1935. This legislation was introduced by Dr. George Weir, Minister of Health in the Liberal government of Premier Duff Patullo. Supported by labour groups, veterans' associations, women's organizations and farmers' organizations, among others, this became law on 1 April 1936.  However, lack of government resources during the Great Depression and substantial opposition by most of the medical profession in British Columbia soon caused it to be postponed indefinitely.

There are also numerous examples of limited health insurance schemes (and quasi insurance schemes) that were implemented. Two examples will suffice. In 1934 the Cottage Hospitalization and Medical Care Plan was launched in Newfoundland to assist fishermen and their families. By 1957 there were reputedly 150,000 members. Doctors were employed on a government retainer plus two-thirds of the ten dollars per year for each family for hospital services, maternity and other medical services. And in British Columbia as early as 1908 Dr. Horace Wrinch had a similar scheme in operation at the Hazelton Hospital (that he had founded and built). For one dollar a month a subscriber was entitled to medical consultations, medicines and hospital costs. By 1923 this has risen to one dollar fifty cents a month. Medicare in Canada has many proud forefathers.

In Alberta in 1935 the United Farmers government passed the Health Insurance Act that established a provincial insurance program, but this was scrapped in the same year by the newly elected Social Credit government.  And in Quebec after a 1933 report of the Social Insurance Commission, the National Assembly passed in 1943 legislation to set up a Health Insurance Commission, but this legislation was repealed in 1945.

At its annual convention in 1919, the federal Liberal Party, under its new leader McKenzie King, adopted the promise of implementing "so far as may be practicable an adequate sickness insurance scheme" having regard to Canada's financial position and in cooperation with the provinces. Cautious words, but indicative of the fact that even in 1919 health insurance was under discussion and seen as a social need. In 1944, a depression, other governments and a world war later, the federal Liberal government organized a conference in Ottawa to discuss its draft health insurance bill. The economist Leonard Marsh was one of the organizers and, I believe, one of the prime movers of this conference. He produced a report (the Marsh Report) that has been compared by writers - who know far more than me on the topic - to the Beveridge Report in the United Kingdom for the scope of its recommended reforms to social security, including national health insurance, for post-war Canada.

Famously, Tommy Douglas introduced and passed the legislation for health care coverage in Saskatchewan in 1946. With the impetus of Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker (the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act of 1957) and Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson (the Medical Care Act of 1966) this led eventually to the Canada Health Act of 1984, which is the legislative foundation for Medicare.

Let us by all means give Tommy Douglas credit for his accomplishment. But let us not forget and write out of history all those other men and women who helped lay the foundations on which his accomplishment was built. The introduction of public health care in Canada owes much to many, many people of all political persuasions. Not that I am suggesting that you yourself do so, but to give all the credit for public health care in Canada to Tommy Douglas alone, as seems increasingly to be the case, is more than a little unfair to those others who toiled for it before him.
Sincerely
Geoffrey Mynett
Vancouver, BC
September 28, 2015