Healthcare privatization logic.

A letter suggested on May 25 that "We simply, in a totally public system, cannot pay the finances required to obtain the specialists and modern equipment required."

One must ask how adding the overhead of executive salaries, marketing, and redundant administrative costs of a privatized system onto the costs of specialists and modern equipment would make these specialists and that equipment more affordable.

Another letter the same day suggested a progressive payment scheme in which affluent people would pay "the full cost" of medical treatment and less affluent people's treatment would be paid for with public money.

Since even affluent people would have difficulty paying "the full cost" of medical treatment, one assumes that enterprising insurance companies, as in the U.S., would fill the void with policies that would drain healthcare dollars from the pockets of affluent people into those of insurance company executives, marketing departments, and redundant administrative organizations.

The suggestion of a progressive healthcare funding plan, preferably where multi-billion dollar corporations pay the lion's share, smaller companies pay progressively less, and individuals pay progressively even less into the public purse – as now – and every dollar paid in is spent on training, staffing, compensation, and medical infrastructure and equipment is an excellent idea.

Two problems plague our erstwhile envy-of-the-world healthcare system.

First, in the name of "flexibility" – a weasel-word for dumping federal costs onto junior governments – the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements and Established Programs Financing Act of 1977 threw out the 50-50 cost sharing arrangement mandated by the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act of 1957 and Medical Care Act of 1966 and replaced it with a complicated scheme that boils down to inadequate funding.

The "flexibility" that resulted is a euphemism for medically ill-advised cuts based not on medical necessity but on too little money to continue delivering the truly remarkable healthcare Canadians and the medical professionals who delivered it previously enjoyed.

Second, 1 in 5 dollars spent in BC is spent on rent, and the operating profit margin of the real estate rental and leasing (RERL) sector is more than 45%, dwarfing that of all other sectors of BC's economy. Canadian homeowner mortgages furthermore, it was reported on May 24, amount to more than Canada's GDP.

This plunder of BC's productive economy by rent seekers, and the enormous share of BC's GDP that homeowners are paying to service their mortgage debt, is justified by appeals to "Economics 101: Supply and Demand" while conveniently overlooking the destructive effects on society of economic rent extraction (profit in no way limited by the cost of production), which defunding BC's healthcare system epitomizes.