Day 33 (Aug 10): A Brief Note on Healthcare

Since I was still sick and resting in bed, I present you instead with a brief note on healthcare.

First, on a somewhat related topic (but not really related, this is more or less an awesome video) I want to direct you to this video, published by the BBC, and titled, The Joy of Stats. As someone who loves studying human geography and demography, and have taken a geomatics course, this video is simply wonderful in how it uses statistics to show human progress in the last 200 years.

In general, Canadians are proud of their healthcare - publicly funded, and often quoted as being the envy of the world. Of several values, our medicare seems to unite Canadians as a concept that is a part of our nation, often with little debate along the mainstream media and population, though not without exception. Perhaps, our medicare is something that differentiates us from Americans, which is essentially what being Canadian is all about. We can feel this love of healthcare in the CBC special, The Greatest Canadian, where Tommy Douglas, father of medicare, was voted as the greatest, beating our founding father John A. Macdonald (6), national hero Terry Fox (2), famous Prime Minister Trudeau (3), and Wayne Gretzky, "The Great One" (10). 

I don't want to get into the healthcare debate at the moment, because a) I said I would keep this brief, and b) I still want to understand the issues significantly more before I start publishing opinions, but I have this to say.

Canada's healthcare may have been the envy of the world at some point, but currently it is riddled with inefficiencies that are being compounded as the baby boomers age. We need to get out of the idea that our system is superior, or that our system is great because it is Canadian, because countries worldwide have gone through healthcare reform and have updated their medicare systems for current world. Many Canadians, myself, seem to immediately dislike the idea of privatization - regardless of whether the system is two tiered, partially, or fully private. 

Taiwan's healthcare system has a mix of public and private providers. I don't understand the system in detail, but the existence of a competitive market for health has helped shape Taiwan's healthcare into a system that rivals those in developed countries, including Canada. And in terms of wait times and options, it's simply great, addressing issues that plague our Canadian systems. Of course, Taiwan's healthcare systems have problems of its own - I'm not saying that privatization is right, or even good, but we shouldn't reject an idea simply because it's not Canadian. Just as Tommy Douglas introduced it to us, we can make any healthcare ideologies Canadian - just as long as we insist it's the world's bestest.