Healthcare funding and GDP.

Yet another call to privatize healthcare offers what it purports to be an exhaustive list of possible remedies for BC's crumbling healthcare system and, as usual, does not even mention the obvious solution: Increase taxes.

Not on workers struggling to make ends meet, but on corporations and high-net worth individuals.

An August 27, 2015, Macleans article titled "Why the NDP's exact plan for the corporate tax rate matters" analyzes in detail the history of Canadian corporate tax rates, the most important takeaway from which is that the Canadian corporate tax rate was slashed relentlessly from 50% in 1980 to 26.3% in 2013. Revenue from corporate taxes remaining constant as a share of GDP despite these cuts is considered a success despite the fact that healthcare costs ignored, evaded, and unmet increase inexorably every year.

Canada's top marginal tax rate for individuals followed a similar trajectory. Good luck finding a graph of those numbers anywhere that is easily accessible by the public as that bit of information is a well-kept secret.

Note also that 1980, that magic year when the financialization of the Western economies became a deteriorating way of life, is not only the fulcrum upon which rests the demolition of the tax base for Canada's public healthcare system, but it also follows closely on the heels of 1977's Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements and Established Programs Financing Act, which began the long slide into insolvency of Canada's healthcare system. Is it really a surprise that strangling revenue kills essential expenditures?

Everyone agrees that population growth, improvements in healthcare technology, and an aging population increase healthcare costs (which can be planned for properly decades in advance but aren't because actors hoarding Canada's wealth refuse to part with it). But corporations and high-net worth individuals – and middle class individuals successfully scared into believing that "raising taxes" means raising taxes on them – use every sophistry imaginable to prevent tax rates from increasing to cover these costs.

The call for privatization mentioned above dismisses "relying on taxation" to meet rising healthcare costs because to do so necessitates "squeez[ing] other ministries – like education, the environment, social services etc.," and urges individuals to exercise more, as if every need for medical treatment results from bad habits and poor lifestyle choices. As for squeezing other ministries: costs do not disappear because taxpayers refuse to pay them.

To summarize: Slash taxes in the face of easily predictable rising costs and your healthcare system inevitably crumbles before your eyes. Ignore the necessity to raise taxes – because people and companies with more disposable income than they can dispose of need it to bid up the prices of financial assets like land and housing – and call relentlessly instead for healthcare to be privatized.

Never mind that executive salaries, marketing, redundant administrative costs, and the consequent necessity of an entirely superfluous layer of private healthcare insurance costs make private healthcare delivery more expensive than public healthcare because the goal is not efficiently delivering healthcare to everyone; it is making healthcare readily available to individuals who exercise regularly and keep their weight down.