Madam Speaker, I am very glad to have the opportunity to debate this motion today. I am glad to see the Minister of Health here. I think that is what ministers should do on opposition days; hear out the opposition. I hope that I will have his ear for just a few minutes and be able to pass on to him some observations of my own and those of my party with respect to what has happened to medicare over the last several years.
I begin by saying that I have been an observer of what is happening to Canada's health care system for a long time. I was the NDP health critic from 1980 to 1984 in the lead-up to the Canada Health Act. I remember very well being in the House speaking at the close of the debate on the Canada Health Act. I want to commend the health minister of that day, Monique Bégin, for bringing in the Canada Health Act, albeit after considerable encouragement on the part of the opposition, which she herself acknowledges in a book about her experiences at that time.
At the end of the debate at that time, I said—and I regret to say that it has come true—that no amount of standards, no amount of principles, no amount of ideals with respect to medicare would save medicare in the absence of adequate funding. In the end, we can have a Canada Health Act as strong as we like in terms of enforcement and in terms of its ideals, but if the publicly funded health care system in this country, that we call medicare, is slowly but surely starved to death, these principles will mean nothing.
If we cannot get the kind of health care that we want and need when we go to the publicly funded health care system this creates two problems. First, there is an immediate problem. We cannot get the health care that we need. We cannot get that diagnostic test, we cannot get the bed that we need or whatever the case may be. We cannot get the treatment that we need. But it creates a longer term problem for the system beyond the problem that it creates for an individual and that is, it builds pressure on the body politic to create an alternative to that system.
More and more Canadians, both those with money and those without very much money, begin to wonder about whether or not it would be in their interest to have another system that they could go to when the public system fails them as a result of it being slowly starved to death.
That is taken advantage of by two groups of people, the insurance companies and the multinational health care corporations that never liked medicare in the first place. The more that medicare is starved to death, the more an opportunity is created for them to make an argument for their kind of health care system.
It creates an opportunity for politicians of various right wing ideologies, like the Harris' and the Kleins, who see in the slow starvation, at least that starvation which is attributable to the federal government, a political excuse for doing what they want to anyway. It sets them up nicely as politicians who would like to create a context in which they could bring in more private funding of health care.
I say to the Minister of Health that this is a genuinely dangerous situation. We had a crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s with respect to extra billing and user fees, and that was solved through the Canada Health Act. But we have a crisis of an entirely different order, a kind of metacrisis now.
I say to the Minister of Health, in all sincerity, that there is a real danger that medicare will be fatally wounded on the watch of the Liberal government, on the watch of the minister. I do not think that is something the minister wants to have on his record. I do not think it is something that he wants. I caution him not to let it happen by stealth, not to find out that some day he is in a position where this is going to happen whether he wants it to happen or not.
I think, unfortunately, what happened in the context of the federal budget is that the day which I do not think the Minister of Health wants, which certainly we in the NDP do not want, has been advanced. That day has been brought closer. The possibility of medicare being fatally wounded on the Liberal watch has been brought closer and made more likely. We will see today. I think it is today that Premier Klein will be bringing in legislation.
The minister may argue, and certainly Mr. Klein will argue, that this is totally in keeping with the Canada Health Act. We can get lawyers on either side of this one, but I think most Canadians would say that what Mr. Klein has in mind and what Mr. Harris is musing about is against the spirit of the Canada Health Act.
Even if it can be argued by the minister, by Mr. Klein and by Mr. Harris that this is somehow not technically a violation of the Canada Health Act because these hospitals will still be paid by the publicly insured system, it will bring these private hospitals into being. Once they are there, do we not think that they will begin to have a political presence, that they will have a presence in medical and health care communities? It will be the thin edge of wedge. It will be the wide edge of the wedge. This will be very, very significant.
I say to the minister that I think he needs to revisit the 12 point plan which a former minister signed, she says under duress, with the province of Alberta. He needs to come down hard, but he needs to come down hard with money, and not for the sake of Alberta. As far as I am concerned, Alberta is a big culprit in this. Alberta could solve all of its medical problems tomorrow by simply having a sales tax like every other province.
When it comes to Alberta, it is not a question of limited resources, it is a question of ideology. But I will tell the minister that in a lot of other provinces it is not a question of limited will or ideology, it is a question of limited resources.
The government cannot say that it cannot afford to carry 50%, while at the same time, by implication, say that it expects the provinces to carry 75% of the load. It just will not happen. It cannot be done.
Even provinces whose governments are committed, whose premiers are committed with every cell of their bodies to medicare, will not be able to do it. At some point public demand to transcend or avoid waiting lists, et cetera, will be too much and other options will have to be sought.
This is what I say to the minister. We are in a very, very dangerous situation.
The original insight behind medicare was that medical decisions would be made on medical grounds; not on market grounds, not on the grounds of profitability or seeking profit, but to take medicine out of the marketplace and make medical decisions for medical reasons.
What has happened over the last 20 years, slowly but surely, is that medical decisions are not made for medical reasons any more. They are not made according to the market, but they are made for fiscal reasons. That too goes against the spirit of medicare, because the spirit of medicare was to make medical decisions medical, not market and not fiscal.
We now have a situation where too many medical and health care decisions are being made for fiscal reasons. If we want to restore the spirit of medicare, then we have to have enough resources in the system so that doctors and other health caregivers can begin to make those decisions; not on the basis of what the finance ministers of the various provinces say or what the federal Minister of Finance says, but on the basis of what they know their patients need.
Going to a private for profit health care system will not do that either. There are health management organizations, HMOs, or whatever they are called in the United States, in which all kinds of decisions on procedures and treatments are restricted or not available because of the profit strategies of that particular health care corporation, so it is a delusion to think that is a solution. What we need is what we had, a health care system where people got what they needed because they needed it and there was adequate funding.
There is not adequate funding at this time. The $2.5 billion extra that we got the other day in the budget is not enough, and I think the health minister knows it is not enough. But it is not enough to say that it is coming. It has to come soon and it has to come in the form of re-establishing a real federal partnership with the provinces. Otherwise the minister can have all of the meetings he likes with his provincial counterparts, but if he does not have the moral high ground, if he is not willing to reclaim the moral high ground—and unfortunately money has a lot to do with that—then it will just be an endless series of seminars where our medicare system keeps getting worse and worse.