How Corporate Profit Is Buying Up Public Health Care in PEI & Elsewhere: Will It Be Sold to the Highest Bidder?
Health care in Canada was built on a simple promise: you get care because you are sick, not because you are rich. But public health care is being chipped away, piece by piece. PEIDoctor, a for-profit service in Prince Edward Island, shows how easily medical care can become a business opportunity.
PEIDoctor sells faster appointments to visitors. It has also advertised a $195 “medical information session” for Canadians, where a doctor explains diagnoses, specialist reports and test results. Maybe I am missing something, but understanding what is happening to your body is not a luxury. It is a basic part of our health care system.
Tracy Glynn of the Canadian Health Coalition says this sounds like medically necessary care and may violate the Canada Health Act. I agree that it needs a close look. Islanders already pay for Medicare through their taxes. They should not have to pull out a credit card to understand what their doctor found. Remember, we as Canadians paid to build the public health care system with our taxes; for-profit corporations should not be able to charge us admission at the door, but it seems that’s where we’re headed if we don’t fight to protect the public system.
This is about more than one company. Across Canada, private businesses are moving into clinics, surgeries and virtual care. The Canadian Health Coalition warns that this can create two tiers: faster access for people who can pay, and longer waits for those who cannot.
The sales pitch is familiar: public care is too slow, so private business must come to the rescue. But private clinics do not create doctors and nurses out of thin air. They draw on the same limited workforce our public hospitals and clinics need. Private for-profit health care does not necessarily shorten the line, but it sells tickets to jump it.
We should watch what happens beyond PEI, too. Nova Scotia’s long-term contracts with private providers raise questions about public cost, oversight and staffing. Alberta’s push toward more private delivery raises a similar question. My view is that governments are not building stronger public care, but are giving companies more room to profit from its weaknesses. Here is the cycle I worry about. Governments fail to invest enough in public care. Waits grow. Private operators offer a paid shortcut. Then those long waits become the reason to expand private care even further. The patient becomes a customer, and the public system is left to do more with less.
As the Canadian Health Coalition puts it, profit doesn’t care. A company answers to its shareholder owners. Our health-care system should answer to the people who need it. Two-tier care does not arrive all at once. It grows through small fees, special services and loopholes that seem harmless on their own, a bit at a time.
I think, as do others, that PEI should decide whether explaining diagnoses and test results is insured care. Ottawa should enforce the Canada Health Act when patients are charged for insured services in all provinces.
We must raise the red flag before a U.S.-style question replaces the promise of Medicare with a system that goes from asking, “How can we help you?” to a system where the first question becomes, “How will you pay?”
Public health care is ours to defend; it’s not theirs to sell.
