Fixing healthcare does not require "private options."

The fantasy never dies that the fix for a healthcare system whose slow death began in 1977 with the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements and Established Programs Financing Act is to "let those who can afford to pay for their healthcare requirements" – to privatize healthcare, in other words.

This argument always leaves aside that ideologically driven cost-cutting, which is the root cause of the collapse of Canada's universal healthcare system, took aim first to cripple its two most critical components: training a sufficient number of healthcare professionals to service a future population as it grows in size and ages; and maintaining staffing levels consistent with empirically derived clinically optimal patient loads.

I find it fascinating that "those who can afford to" are willing to pay for their own healthcare individually, but as a class demanded and received a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 50.9 percent in 1980 to 26.1 percent in 2012, where it has remained ever since, and continue to be taxed on capital gains at an inclusion rate far less than 100 percent.

You get what you pay for.

Hoard all the money and you get overworked, burned out healthcare professionals retiring early; millions of Canadians without a family doctor; long waits for routine non-urgent procedures; and ERs closing for lack of personnel.

You can't have it both ways. Hoard all the money and you get broken public services. Pay what services actually cost and you get a public sector that works.