Comment: Health care: Be careful what you wish for

Philosophy Professor Eike-Henner Kluge writes in the Times Colonist about Canada's "health care squeeze" and the similar situations seen in other countries around the world. Kluge comments on some of the factors that may be contributing to this global problem.

"An opinion piece in this newspaper stated that “Canada is facing a health care squeeze.” That is true, but so is every other country in the world. Germany has a problem, the United States has a problem and so does China. It has nothing to do with how health care is funded. It is simply a result of the fact that as the population ages, the number and severity of health issues increases and one can educate and license only a limited number of physicians, nurses and technicians.

Since health care professionals have not yet perfected the art of being in two places at once, wait times are inevitable and it doesn’t matter who pays.

But never mind. Some have proposed the solution that is supposed to fix this is to change the current Canadian single-stream publicly funded health care system to a system like that of the United States, where both public and private funding run side-by-side.

Before doing that, there are facts that should be kept in mind, but that are generally ignored by those who advocate a U.S.-style approach."

Read the full article in the Times Colonist.