Canada’s socialist healthcare system threatens to bankrupt provincial governments.
Socialism, in theory, provides equally for the needs of all citizens. In practice, as the French discovered early in the game, socialism unleashes unlimited, unsatisfiable desires for everything, so long as it’s at someone else’s expense. Our Keynesian monetary policy and the New Deal and Great Society welfare entitlements are examples.
When the fiction of socialistic economic theory is imposed, people are told that benefits are free, because there is more than enough for everyone when the rich are deprived of their unjust, high share of wealth and income. People are told that they have a so-called constitutional right to whatever they want, without having to work and save to pay for it.
In the real economic world, wealth is no more than the production of goods and services that people are willing to buy with the earnings of their own labor and ingenuity. Governments create nothing. They merely take from people who produce and redistribute those takings to other people. Every socialist society reaches a point at which the sum of its accumulated promises of “free” benefits exceeds that production of real goods and services and outruns that society’s borrowing capacity.
This is the stage we in the United States have entered, and it is abundantly exemplified in Canada’s healthcare system, which, as presently constituted, appears headed toward collapse.
In the near future, Canadian provincial governments, facing growth of healthcare expenses at a more rapid rate than tax revenues, may be compelled to reduce support for education and infrastructure maintenance.
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Monday’s headline from Reuters — “Soaring costs force Canada to reassess health model” — is a warning. In the not-too-distant future, the headline will be used again, except “U.S.” will replace “Canada.”
...The popularity of the system doesn’t make it functional, though. In 2009, health care spending in Canada devoured 40% of the provincial governments’ budgets and expenditures have been rising by 6% a year. At that rate, or even half that rate, it wouldn’t be long before the provincial governments did nothing but fund health care. The Ontario government says health care spending could consume 70% of its budget within just 12 years.
...Two years ago, Claude Castonguay, known as the father of the Quebec public health care system that became the model for the rest of the country, made what had to be a painful admission. Canada’s socialist health care program, he said, had reached “a crisis point."
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