Why is CBC pushing privatizing healthcare?

Brian Day lost his case. Cui bono from CBC refusing to let it go?

Private healthcare providers charge extra for executive salaries, investors' returns, marketing, and membership fees.

To pay all of this overhead, a person needs "supplemental healthcare insurance," which 30% of the Canadian public do without. "Diversifying" the healthcare system with private clinics, then, amounts to instantiating a two-tier system where people with money get no-wait Cadillac service and everybody else gets underfunded, understaffed, overworked, and crowded hospitals and clinics.

CBC should stop selling its readers privatization as if it is a solution to Canada's healthcare crisis because it isn't and start demanding that Ottawa fund the provincial and territorial public healthcare systems 50-50 as the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act, passed in 1957, and Medical Care Act, adopted in 1966, explicitly require.

Many innovations and improvements to Canada's healthcare system are necessary, including licensing healthcare professionals nationally, electronic medical records accessible nationwide, multidisciplinary team-oriented primary care clinics, and many more; but privatizing will achieve only two, both negative, outcomes: higher cost and two-tier access.

For-profit infrastructure, by definition, whether healthcare, housing, or any other service, is more expensive than public infrastructure because for-profit providers are in the business of extracting as much economic rent from the productive economy as they can. "Supply and demand," remember?

Government deliberately underfunding healthcare, as Ottawa has been doing at least since the 1990s, is a time-tested strategy to break the public system: overwork and burn out personnel with understaffing so they quit, make wait times intolerable to frustrate the public so people become angry and demand better. Then the deep-pocketed constituency whom the politicians who broke the healthcare system represent step forward with privatization schemes that are good for themselves and ruinous for the economy and the population as a whole.

Look at housing. Canada had a robust social (publicly financed) housing policy from WWII through the early 1990s. Now real estate holding corporations and banks, which have driven the price of housing into the stratosphere, are draining as much of the surplus that the Canadian economy produces into their own pockets as they can.

Next is healthcare. CBC should be reporting on post-colonial economics, not promoting privatizing healthcare.