this is complete nonsense, and no study anywhere has ever backed this up. it's faith-based reasoning that reduces to a mythology of free markets.
markets are not a way to create resources, they are a way to distribute them. opening up a market in health care will consequently not reduce wait times, but merely redistribute them to the less wealthy. at the end of the day, you have x resources to distribute regardless of how you distribute them.
the system does not need more competition. the system needs more funding.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/landmark-private-health-care-lawsuit-heads-to-court-1.3749117
this is not about reducing wait times. it's about rich people thinking they should have the privilege to jump the queue. and, i expect the court to reject the arguments.
i do at least hope that the court has learned that it should not articulate itself the way it did in the quebec ruling. the quebec ruling was not designed to allow for private health insurance. it was designed to increase funding. but, the government used it as an opportunity to open up an industry. the court was not expecting the government to interpret it that way.
in fact, if the reverse question were presented to the court in the quebec context, i would expect it to be more explicit in upholding the canada health act.
the court needs to be more careful, this time. i expect it will be.
to be clear...
you could articulate the question one of two ways.
you could argue that the ban on private insurance means you have to wait in line and this is unfair. or, you could argue that allowing private insurance increases wait times by distributing resources to the wealthy and this is unfair. on some level, both arguments are valid. the question is what is of greater priority: equality or hierarchy.
what the court can do is determine if the law is unconstitutional or not. it has not previously ruled against the law, despite the rumblings in the right-wing media. what it has done in the past is agree that wait times are too long and that the state should take steps to reduce them. the state then determined that it should offer private services, rather than increase funding.
the problem is that the premise was absurd. the court got sloppy. it was a terrible ruling. wait times in quebec have not reduced. and that piece of evidence will likely not be viewed as irrelevant.
the precise question before the court is whether the ban on private insurance is restricting access to health care. the court needs to be explicit in citing evidence that explicitly rejects this argument as specious, rather than trying to use it as an opportunity to coerce the government into increasing funding. last time, it backfired. they got sloppy. they need to not repeat that error.
in the mean time, i would call on civil liberties groups in quebec to reverse the quebec government's misinterpretation of the previous ruling.
this is the result of allowing private insurance in quebec, instead of tackling the issue at a funding level.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/06/03/quebec-wait-times_n_10278874.html