Health Care in Canada

FYI: Canada proudly has one of the highest life expectancies (about 80 years) and lowest infant mortality rates of industrialized countries, which many attribute to Canada's health care system.

Canada's health care system is a group of socialized health insurance plans that provides coverage to all Canadian citizens. It is publicly funded and administered on a provincial or territorial basis, within guidelines set by the federal government.

But now the Canadian Medical Association has recommended allowing private competition to enter its national healthcare system.

That way lies disaster, Dr. Arnold S. Relman argued last week on globeandmail.com, the online partner of The Globe and Mail in Toronto.

"If Canada were so unwise as to allow privatization to grow in its health-care system, it would sooner or later experience all of the problems driving the US system toward collapse," wrote Relman, a Harvard emeritus professor and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. "When medical care and health insurance are allowed to become private businesses, costs go up and patients with little or no resources do not get the care they need. That is the lesson Canadians should learn from the United States."

Quoted from Boston Globe.