The simple truth is Ontario’s health care system is running out of our money to pay for our health care.
That’s why we keep hearing about cases of patients being denied necessary surgery — particularly when it has to be done in the U.S. — and life-prolonging medications.
In the Sun’s news section today, Queen’s Park columnist Christina Blizzard tells the story of Erika Crawford, 17, whose family plans to go ahead with life-saving surgery in the U.S. to prevent her death from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, even though OHIP has callously refused to fund the expensive procedure.
Recently, Blizzard wrote about the plight of three-year-old Liam Reid, whose parents went ahead with eye-saving treatment available only in Detroit, with no guarantee OHIP will pay for that.
Over the summer, Blizzard wrote about 67-year-old Percy Bedard, denied OHIP funding for a life-prolonging drug for his prostate cancer because the health ministry doesn’t believe it’s cost effective.
The truth is that as time goes on, there are going to be more and more stories like this.
While billion-dollar scandals like eHealth make these stories all the more frustrating for Ontarians, because of the appalling waste of scarce health-care dollars, the truth is governments across Canada, not just the Dalton McGuinty government in Ontario, are struggling with the same issues.
Since there isn’t enough money to give everyone the care they need, politicians and health bureaucrats routinely deny medically necessary services and treatments to save money.
This often means choosing between who will live and who will die, and who will suffer and who will lead a normal life.
To be sure, this review process has always been in place, particularly for out-of-province treatments and for funding new medications, since no publicly funded health care system can possibly provide every service to everyone.
But as the health care budget creeps towards eating up half of all spending in Ontario, these decisions are only going to become more frequent, and harder.
As long as our politicians continue to boast that we have “the best health care system in the world” when, demonstrably according to international studies we don’t, nothing will change.
Somewhere along the way in Canada, we lost our way on health care.
Justifiably proud of our universal health care system and understandably wary of the American model which provides first-class care for those who can afford it, and denies it to those who can’t, we failed to innovate.
We failed to develop a middle path between the private and public systems — as many industrialized countries have successfully done — that delivers better health care more efficiently than our system, or the American one.
Until we do, things are only going to get worse.
We need the courage to innovate and change.