Mr. Speaker, it was a delight to serve with this member on the finance committee. Dare I say it, we spent some numbers of hours together listening to witnesses, albeit on opposite sides of the table.
I was very interested in the member's comments. We heard the same things from the witnesses, that health care is indeed a very big concern among those people at least who came to our committee. Of course we are also hearing it in our ridings. I often get testimonials from people whose loved ones had to go to the hospital. They say “Hey, we do not know what the hullabaloo is all about because we had really good care”. It is good to hear those stories on the other side.
I have a very fundamental philosophical question that I would like to ask the member who just spoke since she is a medical doctor and very interested in health care. She mentioned a deterioration of health care into a two tier system. I wonder how she would answer this question.
There are right now a fair number of Canadians who, because of their accumulation of wealth, are able to go to that part of the world where the best health care is available. I had a person in my riding not very long ago who fiddled around with Canada's health care system and finally went to the Mayo Clinic where he received a proper diagnosis of what his problems were. He had to pay for it of course, and fortunately he had the financial wherewithal to do it.
What should we really be doing so that we prevent this move to a two tier system? Should we legislate at the border? A person may not cross if their purpose of going into the U.S. is to look for health care in order to equalize it for everyone here? I think she would reject that. I certainly would.
I think if a person has the money and chooses so to spend it, that should be their choice, provided of course that they have earned the money by legal means. But we need to do something in this country so that people would not even want to go elsewhere. Under the present system that does not seem to be happening. It is getting worse and worse.
The federal government used to fund 50% of health care and used to have a really good insertion of funds for medical research, which is very good for medical services. That has deteriorated.
One of the things we heard over and over was about the exodus of our brightest people into the United States because of the research facilities that are available.
I would like a comment on the two tier system because I am very interested in it.