Two Tier Health Care System

Words: 750
Pages: 3

According to a recent Global News article, “Canada has been ranked third-to-last in a study comparing health-care systems in 11 developed nations.”1 Currently Canada provides a publicly funded Universal Health Care system, where all Canadian residents have reasonable access to medically necessary hospital and physician services without paying out-of-pocket.2, 3 Canadian Medical Association has developed a policy document on some current weaknesses of the Canadian health care system.4 As a result, there has been a rise in question to change our current health system into a two-tier health care. A two-tier health care refers a system where everyone can access a basic publically funded health care program and a secondary tier care that allows …show more content…
Firstly, if there are two systems, it raises a concern in terms the difference in quality. Since physicians are able to participate in both systems, people might feel obligated to get private insurance, even though they are unable afford it. Also, when a two-tier system is introduced, it may also create segregation within the population: one for the rich and another for everyone else. Therefore, the addition of the “private insurance” would violate the accessibility criteria under the Health Care Act. Accessibility means that there should be no barriers to reasonable access to health care.2,3 Thus, access must be based on medical need of the person and not their ability to pay.2 Referring to the theory of decreased wait times, Australia had a publicly funded health care system like Canada’s before introducing a parallel private-pay system in 1999 and the result was the waiting times in the public pay system became longer, not shorter.5 Survey data from UK confirmed that wait times in the public system increased in proportion to the increase in private for-profit health care.5 Health care professional are moving from the public to private system to serve the more ‘profitable’ patients, and therefore induce the shortage of staff, which was already a problem. As a result, the doctors may have gotten richer but it leaves the cases and patients that are most complex, vulnerable, sick and costly for the public system to