Private-pay.

Lobbying is now appearing for a "private-pay option" to "improve" health care.

The obvious selling point for 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 from the queue.

There is more to this flurry of marketing than that, though, as "private-pay" is 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. This business model in turn translates into armies of arbiters of "medical necessity" inserted 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 fact, they need them. And of course private healthcare payment corporations place arbitrary limits on lifetime payouts per policy holder, treatment category, or other time period.

These financial juggling games merely privatize the root cause of Canada's healthcare system collapse, namely arbitrarily assigning a percentage of GDP or rate of increase or decrease to system-wide expenditure that completely ignores or does not bother to gather empirical data that actually quantify Canada's healthcare system's funding requirements.

Speaking of empirical data, it was suggested that school liaison officer programs continue so that data can be collected to measure their effects on Black and Indigenous school children. Proposing scientific experiments on racialized minorities' kids, particularly in the face of the kids' refusals to participate in them, used to be called racism. Now objecting to them is branded "wokeism." My, how times have changed.