Canada’s health care system going broke

Remember when the folks in Washington jammed Obamacare down our throats? Remember, they pointed to Canada’s single payer system as an example of what our health care system should be?  It now seems, surprise, surprise that all is not going so well for Canada.

The Canadian provinces are crumbling under the cost of providing “free” medical care to all residents.

Healthcare in Canada is delivered through a publicly funded system, which covers all “medically necessary” hospital and physician care and curbs the role of private medicine. It ate up about 40 percent of provincial budgets, or some C$183 billion ($174 billion) last year.

Canada, relies primarily on the provinces to pay for the bulk of the cost, much like Obamacare relies primarily upon the states to cover the bulk of the uninsureds under Medicaid.

Spending has been rising 6 percent a year under a deal that added C$41.3 billion of federal funding over 10 years.

But that deal ends in 2013, and the federal government is unlikely to be as generous in future…

So, the provinces will either have to pick up more and more of the costs, or, find another solution.  The estimate in Ontario is that if something isn’t done to deal with this problem, in twelve years, Ontario will spend a whopping 70% of its budget on health care for its residents.

So far, Ontario has decided to attack pharmaceutical companies (sound familiar?), British Columbia is going to  fee for procedure payments in lieu of annual grants, and, Quebec has added a new flat tax to help defray the cost, and, perish the thought, is actually considering that patients make co-pays for each visit.  Not surprisingly, the folks in Quebec claim this latter idea to be “illegal”.

Perhaps this explains why some 20 states, as of now, have filed suits seeking to have Obamacare declared unconstitutional.  There just isn’t any more money.