Privatizing Canada's Health Care Is Not The Answer: Lessons From The USA, Prominent US Physician Discusses Her Perspective In CMAJ

Main Category: Public Health
Also Included In: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Article Date: 06 Oct 2008 - 10:00 PDT

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Investing in Canada's public health system is the best way to improve it, rather than privatization, writes Dr. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. The article was published online today in CMAJ.

Dr. Angell cautions against a US-style model of health care, arguing that "the US health care system is enormously inefficient compared with the Canadian system." Health care costs in the United States per person are double those in Canada, outcomes are worse and it is less efficient.

"I would urge Canadians not to be swayed by the siren song of the privatizers," writes Dr. Angell. "This is about profiteering as much as it is about health care. The same businesses that have made an exorbitantly expensive and unhealthy mess of the US system stand ready to do the same in Canada."

"Canada's medicare is one of the best health care systems in the world - far superior to the US system….The wisest course for Canada is to expand and reinforce the public system, not undermine it," she concludes.

About CMAJ

CMAJ is the leading health sciences journal in Canada. CMAJ is a general medical journal publishing original research and review articles, commentaries and editorials, practice updates, an arts and ideas section and health news. Published continuously since 1911, new issues are uploaded on http://www.cmaj.ca every second Monday at 4:30 p.m. EST/EDT. http://www.cmaj.ca contains the complete editorial contents of CMAJ, supplemented by a variety of interactive features and additional content.

CMAJ is an open- and free-access journal - there are no author or page charges and access is provided free on the web (HighWire Press), http://www.cmaj.ca without registration. http://www.cmaj.ca has about 1 million requests and 250,000 page views per month. The Journal is part of the PubMed Central collection of journals http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov at the National Library of Medicine thus providing a guarantee of permanent archiving and open access. PubMed Central is now processing back issues of CMAJ to 1911.

Visit http://www.cmaj.ca for medical knowledge that matters.

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