Eh yes! We talk about health because we have to. The subject is not very summery, I agree. But what do you want, the disease, unlike elected officials and doctors, never takes a vacation.
• Read also: “We become traders. There is a drift in Quebec!”: no less than 150 doctors went from public to private last year
The newspaper confirmed yesterday to what extent in Quebec, private healthcare continues to gain ground. The phenomenon is not new. What is is how quickly it is expanding.
Let’s understand each other. We are talking here about what I call the private-private. The pure and hard. The one you pay with your credit card in a completely private clinic and not that of a GMF where your health insurance card is enough.
“We become traders. There is a drift in Quebec!”. These are the words not of a dangerous communist, but of a doctor worried about the accelerated shift towards private-private. Quoted by The newspaper, he puts his finger on a real ethical, social and political problem. Even moral.
If “no less than 150 doctors went from public to private last year” and that the “public network becomes a recruitment platform” for the private sector, it is because the thing is completely legal.
It is legal because our governments allow it. A doctor only has to temporarily disaffiliate from the Régie de l’assurance- maladie du Québec to go private-private. He can even do it several times a year.
It is also legal because since well before the pandemic, the operating time offered to specialists in our hospitals is not enough for the task.
Yet we already pay our taxes for a health network supposed to be “public, universal and free”. Find the mistake.
Patients “invited” to pay top dollar
One example among many: The newspaper reports that “36,507 patients have been waiting for orthopedic surgery, 4,584 of them for over a year. This is the longest wait in Quebec.
Result: to go faster, doctors no longer hesitate to “invite” their patients to pay tens of thousands of dollars to be operated quickly in private-private. Either by them or by one of their colleagues.
It’s “medical tourism”, but without leaving Quebec. Inevitably, this creates two classes of patients. The minority able to pay and the majority unable to do so.
Always because the public is too slow, we also see an increased use of the private-private to simply see a family doctor or a specialist. Ditto for important diagnostic examinations – ultrasounds, scans, colonoscopies, samples, etc. Bills going up fast…
Fifty years after the creation of health insurance, it is a major social regression.
Like a dog biting its tail
Obviously, since it is “legal”, but socially inequitable, no one dares to openly “encourage” the commodification of the health of Quebecers. Neither the federations of doctors nor the government.
At the same time, as nobody fights on the bus on the subject either – the people of Quebec are sometimes of a hopeless docility – the practice is not prohibited.
The whole thing, mind you, had been written in the sky for a while. For its zero deficit, the Bouchard government had cut hard in health. The Couillard government has adopted austerity.
The recipe is simple. Call it neoliberalism 101. The more the public health system is weakened by debilitating cuts and reforms, the more the private-private takes over.
The more he takes over, the more he vampirizes at the same time part of the medical staff of the public. Which, in turn, further weakens the public network. The perfect storm, what.
In short, it’s the dog biting its tail while pretending not to realize it.