I am pleased that the members recognize that I can read.
I would like to balance what members opposite talked so strongly about, of putting greater control in the hands of the province, against a statement made not too long ago by another Reform member in the human resources committee. The statement made was: "Well, I come from a have province. We contribute money to Confederation. Should we not be able to dictate the kinds of services those people in the poor provinces get?" At the root of my feelings about this debate is what it says about us as a country.
We made a decision a long time ago that we were going to provide health care. We were going to see that every person no matter where they lived in the country, no matter what their income level, would be entitled to basic health care. We made that decision as a country. We have followed through on that promise.
Reform members talk so loudly about supporting the wishes of their constituents. There is no other service government delivers that the people value as much as their health care system.
The Reform Party reminds me of the old story about the doctor whose only answer to a query was: "Take two aspirins and call me in the morning". On every policy issue that is debated its members say one thing: "We have a deficit. We do not have the money for it so we have to cut somewhere. We have to get out of it". It strikes me that a party that has been around here for a while which has some intelligent, thoughtful people in it, could think a little harder about what they are really saying.
We spend between 4 and 4.5 per cent of the federal budget on health care. In doing so, we buy ourselves one of the finest health care systems in the world. This is the point of attack
Reformers have chosen to solve the deficit problem. It is not funny. It is tragic that they would attack a service that is so valuable to so many people who have so few options.
It is fine to talk about the wealthy individual who can walk into any place in the world and buy what he or she needs. However we also have to think about the person who cannot do that. It is something that has been a part of our values for all my working life, and hopefully will be for all my life.
There is another aspect to this. I think we have to ask the Reform Party to be a little more intellectually honest. In the proposal put forward it talks about the fall from 50 per cent to 23 per cent. I suppose it is done to heighten the fears it might engender in people or to heighten the arguments that can be made about the role of the federal government and what the federal government has or has not done. However, that is simply not true. It is false information, which the party has put on the record in order to strengthen its debate.
The fact is that the first number refers to the federal government's share of spending on hospital and physician services, our contribution to medicare. The second number refers to the federal share of total health spending, things like non-prescription drugs, cough drops, et cetera. The Reform Party knows this, and its researchers should know this, and to bring it forward simply discredits the debate it wishes to have.
Reform members talk about creating a list of services, which presumably some bureaucrats in Ottawa would manage, having consulted with doctors, and they would tell us what medical services we could have and what medical services we could not have.
The Reform Party has been accused on occasion of looking south for its policy initiatives. I do not want to spend all of my time walking through that particular model, but I would like to note a couple of things.
I had a recent experience in the United States. I lived there for a few years. I met a man in Los Angeles, quite a wealthy man, who had a very serious cancer of the jaw. He received very good medical service. Following a technique that is available here in Canada, they replaced his jawbone with a piece of bone taken from his thigh. It was marvellous. It was truly a wonderful piece of work.
He walked out of that hospital and was told that was it, his insurance was now cancelled. Despite the fact that he is wealthy and despite the fact that he has the resources, he cannot at any price buy service. In the system the Reform Party promotes, he cannot buy service for the rest of his life.
I would like to give another example. This happened to my nephew, who lives in Los Angeles. He drove to another state on a vacation and he fell and cut the palm of his hand on a piece of glass. He cut a tendon, so it was a little more serious than just a cut in his hand. He was rushed to the local hospital and they looked at it and put a compress on it and said: "Your insurance only covers this immediate service. To get the tendon repaired you have to go back to a health jurisdiction that your insurance respects". He had to drive some 500 miles to get a fairly serious repair. He could have lost the function of his finger.
When we talk about letting the provinces decide and when we talk about letting individual hospitals decide, are we not talking about a system that says that a person may not be able to get service because the level of coverage in their province does not cover them for all of those things? Is that not exactly the kind of divisive force that the Reform Party promotes when it talks about the have provinces being able to dictate the level of services in the have not provinces? I reject that.
Frankly, in this country we have a very serious problem. We are seeing an increasing polarization between those who are well to do, who can take care of themselves and live a comfortable life, and those who are not so fortunate. We are fast building a community not unlike those we see around large cities in the U.S., walled cities, walled communities, which have a wall built around them to keep the bad folks out. We are building a society that is less inclusive, less caring, less Canadian than the one I believe in. The Reform Party needs to consider very carefully what it is promoting when it talks about the destruction of our health care system.
One of the discussions the Reform Party brought forward in its motion is the idea that we would have a matrix of services or a list of services. It is interesting that the provinces and the federal government do not want to impose a list of services. They do not want it because they want to do what the member for Beaver River said in her closing remarks: they want the decisions about care to be decided between the doctor and the person who needs the care. The federal government believes that. It is enshrined in the principles. The provinces also want that.
The member who spoke just before the member for Beaver River made a comment about universality. It is odd to me that the Reform Party finds universality such a difficult concept to understand. All universality means is that everyone has access. If they do not want to have universality, as they have been stating, despite the agreement, who are they going to exclude? If they are not going to have universality, who then is outside of that universal range?