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As Canada, Canadians and our health-care system emerge from the COVID pandemic, it would be nice to say we have emerged unscathed. But that would be untrue.
One point on which we can claim victory is that our universal health-care and political system produced a higher per-capita survival rate than the American insurance risk management health-care and political system.
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But that is not good enough. In fact, health-care professionals say our system, and those who make it run, came as close to the breaking point as we ever wanted to see. It has been a century since the last pandemic. Was public health policy at all three levels of government ready for a 21st-century pandemic? I think not.
Now is the time for federal and provincial/territorial governments to prepare for the next pandemic by closely examining COVID, and how our health-care system and public policies responded to it. The federal government, along with representatives of the provinces and territories, should establish a Royal Commission on health care and epidemic management.
It needs to look objectively at how government policies responded to the public health emergency. A century ago, it was much easier to shut down an economy. In 2023, the economy, travel and communication are far more complex, interrelated and international.
Society in the 1920s was also more compliant. While naïve and laughable, the so-called truckers’ convoy did serve as an indicator of a minority’s ill-informed frustration with public health restrictions. U.S. opposition began earlier but never really reached a level that prompted the convoy of the ignorant.
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Second, governments need to recognize that while Canada has had universal health care for more than 50 years, it is long past time that governments established it as a permanent feature rather than an ad hoc program whose fate is decided with each annual budget.
During tough fiscal times, all governments first attack budgets for health care and education. That needs to stop. You simply cannot tell a person who suffered a heart attack that they cannot have further care because of budget cuts. Babies will also not wait for funding.
Third, addressing health-care funding on the backs of professionals is reprehensible. Reportedly, some 1,500 doctors in Alberta have left the profession since the pandemic.
Several years ago, the province limited the number of patients a doctor might see in a day. As a result, one doctor specializing in pain management had to eliminate walk-in service. A Calgary doctor closed his family practice. It seems the practice, with many seniors, was losing money because the doctor was spending a little extra time with those patients.
Back in the 1980s and ’90s there was a surplus of physicians, so the province allowed universities to raise medical school tuitions. Potential students were either deterred or went abroad to study. Currently, approximately 10,000 Canadians are unable to get admission to our medical schools and end up studying abroad. Often, we lose those doctors permanently to foreign countries. We must address this problem now.
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In addition to generating more physicians through our universities, Alberta should seriously consider recruiting physicians from the U.S. and changing how foreign physicians are accredited in Canada.
Alberta’s single-payer health-care system is far less complex than its American counterpart, where doctors practise insurance rather than medicine. While U.S. fees are higher, clinic costs are also much higher. The cost of administrative staff, liaising with insurance companies, is on the order of one-third to one-half of clinic costs.
U.S. fees may be higher but Canadians who have practised in the U.S. and returned to Canada say a U.S. physician’s take-home pay is less than a Canadian’s, and Canadian doctors get more satisfaction by actually practising medicine.
Mr. Shaikh is a Calgary businessman and philanthropist who has two daughters and a son-in-law who are physicians.
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