More than a fallacy. A frontal attack.

An Oct 18, 2024, CBC News article, "B.C. election comes at pivotal moment for health care: workers," reports that, "The Conservatives want to increase care through a new model, one that delivers services through both public and private facilities but is universally funded by the province."

The Conservative plan – to invite finance-sector "investors" to exploit a shortfall in BC of particular healthcare capacities (day surgery clinics, for example) and then "bid" for contracts – creates the illusion of cost savings via competition.

The obvious question is how – rather than for BC Health to build, staff, equip, and operate these clinics itself – adding the overhead of executive salaries, marketing, redundant administrative costs, and "investors'" returns would make services provided by such clinics more affordable.

Besides, allowing profit-driven providers and their bankers a foothold in BC's healthcare sector is a camel's nose under the multitrillion-dollar tent of universal healthcare.

Once financialized healthcare has insinuated itself into the system, the obvious sales pitch for expansion – to affluent people who do not like waiting in lines – is that "private-pay" would shorten wait times by eliminating people who cannot afford to pay for "Cadillac service" from the queue, at which point "private-pay" becomes code for private health insurance.

Healthcare costs being far greater than the price, for example, of an oil change, "private-pay" opens the door to for-profit health insurance corporations, which make their money on the spread between premiums collected and healthcare bills paid, a business model that translates into armies of arbiters of "medical necessity" interposed between doctors and patients whose job is to deny policy holders treatment and whose salaries policy holders pay.

For-profit health insurance also encourages proliferation of cleverly designed, deliberately inadequate "plans" that withhold payment for services policy-holders guess they will never need when, in the event, they need them. And of course private health insurance corporations place arbitrary limits on lifetime payouts per policy holder, treatment category, or other time period.

Systematically underfunding universal healthcare in Canada, starting with the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements and Established Programs Financing Act in 1977, has brought hospitals and clinics across Canada: chronic understaffing, inadequate worker compensation, noncompliance with empirically derived clinical standards, healthcare professional burnout, not enough training seats for the future (which is now), and – the gold standard for destroying a public service – failure to meet Canadians' expectations, and their consequent anger, with regard to the lack of availability of healthcare services.

This concerted, decades-long attack having finally torn Canada's healthcare system to shreds, the next step is for mouthpieces for transnational finance to offer innocuous-sounding schemes to kick open the door to privatization, meaning plunder, of healthcare in Canada.