The member for St. John's West just said the income for seniors when we look at some of the restricted incomes that our seniors are on.
However, under the new plan, which is not a Cadillac plan, there is a $5,000 deductible. In other words, the only time the insurance company will pay anything is when it is over $5,000. It is a huge expense for them. I do not think we want to go there. We understand that the American system has big problems. I do not think we want to consider going into that system.
As one of the member's mentioned this morning, there is no question that the American health care system is driven by two groups of people, lawyers and insurance companies. I might mention actuaries as well who determine the rates of these individuals whether they are young people or older people. In fact some people cannot get any coverage at all. It is just like car insurance, if people are poor drivers it is really tough to get insurance. Some companies simply will not insure them no matter how much money they want to pay.
The interesting thing about the Kirby report is that it hit some of this head on and is pretty daring in some of the things that it proposed. One of the things that he suggested was that any new money, and he was talking about $5 billion a year going into the system, must buy change. He stated that throwing money into the system would not do the trick. It would not produce the kind of results that we want to see.
One of the reasons that would lead to that conclusion from those of us who watch the Auditor General's reports with a great deal of interest is the simple fact that under our system today, the system where we are transferring money to the provinces to deliver health care, the Liberal government has no idea how much money goes to the provinces. It does not know how much money is being spent on health care. The Auditor General pointed that out.
The reason being is that under the social transfer that money can be either spent on health, welfare or secondary education. How much of it goes to health? We do not know. What are the outcomes? There is no way under the Canada Health Act to measure whether it is being used in an efficient manner or if some of it is being wasted.
I would like to give an example. A couple of years ago the federal government put $250 million into new technology. Would a lawnmower be new technology? Would woodworking equipment in a hospital be new technology? Without being sophisticated health care administrators or doctors at any level, our answer would be no. However it shows the lack of safeguards and insurances built into the system to ensure that money is being spent wisely and in a fashion the program was designed for in the first place.
The money must buy change according to Senator Kirby and his committee. He said the health care system cannot go on the way that it has been going because we cannot sustain it. If we want to save the system, he suggested that we must be willing to pay for it. This is where we will part company with a lot of people on this one. He said that if we want this system we must ante up to the cash register.
He suggested that we could do it in a couple of different ways, but the final report came down to premiums for all Canadians on a progressive scale. People in the higher tax brackets would be paying more for that premium and people at the lower end would be paying less. It would boil down to people in our income bracket paying about $4 a day to preserve the system under the Kirby plan. People in the lower income brackets would be pay about 50¢ for that or the price of half a cup of coffee. Those are the decisions or observations he has thrown out there. Are we willing to pay for it? Before we jump up and start screaming that we are not willing to do that, we must examine a number of things.
First, is the statement made by members of other parties regarding the waste in government. There is no question there is waste in government and that those people over there have gone on a spending spree over the last number of years. I give them credit for some of the things they have done, such as deficit reduction, but there is no question that the spending side of it is something they do not brag about. That spending now is 25% higher than when they came to office. We must sort some of that out as well.
How much of it went to health care? We do know that the government put money into health care a couple of years ago. That money, as Kirby said, just disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to that money. It is, in a sense, unaccounted for.
We have spent a little bit of money on the military and not enough, of course. Some in the House are saying that we need more money for infrastructure in our cities. How much would that cost? It would be in the billions. Some are saying that the military needs a massive infusion of money. How much would that be? It could be $4 billion or $8 billion over a period of years. Some of us are suggesting that it must be billions immediately. What that precise number would be, I do not know, and I do not think anybody does, but we do know that money must come from some place.
We must be careful how we categorically reject that idea of a premium. When we are saying that we will find that money, that $5 billion a year that Kirby says must go into the system immediately on a sustained basis, can that money be found in government waste? I do not think we can find $5 billion in government waste today. Even if we take the two jets the Prime Minister bought that the Government of Canada did not need, that totals only $100 million. It is like C.D. Howe said, but we have gone from “What's a million?” to “What's a billion?” Well, a billion is a thousand million. That is a lot of money.
The Kirby committee suggested and rejected the idea of a dedicated tax. However, this might come with the Romanow report. The committee said that half of the GST, that is 3.5% of the 7%, should go directly into health care. It would be very transparent. We would know exactly how much was coming in from the federal government. However, the option other than a premium would be a dedicated tax. How would that work? Would Canadians categorically reject that?
The Prime Minister does not get out of bed in the morning, and he seldom puts his slippers on, unless he does a poll. The government has done a lot of polling on this, as have the think-tanks. What that polling has told the government is that 80% of Canadians support either a premium or a dedicated tax provided there are guarantees that health care will be there for you, Mr. Speaker, your children, my children and generations of Canadians who are coming behind us. This progressive decline in our health care system has all of us worried.
We only have to look to the south of us, which is how I opened the debate in the first place, to see how a system can come off the rails. We do not want that to happen in Canada, so I think that as Canadians we have to be prepared to make tough decisions. It reminds me of the 1980 election. There is a gentleman sitting behind me, the right hon. member for Calgary Centre, who as the prime minister at the time, going into that very tough election, proposed some tough dues for Canadians. What he suggested at that time was an 18¢ per gallon gas tax, which would have delivered the country from debt within five years, if I am correct. We as Canadians categorically rejected that. We said we would not do it. I can remember a friend of mine saying, and this is as true as I am standing here, “That's a case of beer a week for me. I'm not going to go for that”. But look where we have gone from there. The country would have been debt free. Now we are still burdened with a $550 billion combined debt in the country from over the years.