Canada’s Medicare system crumbling

Most Americans feel that their counterparts in Canada are much luckier to have a free, democratic medicare system against the expensive one available in USA. No doubt, medical treatment is expensive in US, but then you have access to best treatment in the world. In Canada, you need to be in queue to get yourself registered, unless God forbid, you face a life-threatening emergency.

In Canada getting best medical attention is getting elusive. Those who had experienced the medicare system ten years ago would vouch for the downfall in the services.

As always, the blame is being passed on to the “abuse and the insatiable demands” of an ever expanding clientele of elderly relatives sponsored by Third World immigrants. As is said, that statistics can prove anything and even truth, if required, it has been statistically projected that unskilled dependent children is taking heavy toll on medicare.

No doubt that population growth is principal reason why the Canadian health system needs havey deficit financing and hospitals across the country are facing service cuts to meet the legal requirement for a balanced budget. Seventy percent of Canada’s population growth is driven by immigration.

What is unfortunate that it is not being understood that it is these very immigrants that provide cheap labor force to the economy and if they enjoy a small fraction of redistributive benefits or subsidies even a bit disproportionately at the expense of higher income groups, it should not be regretted.

However, instead of this, what is being propagated is that “the benefits extended to poorer sections of the society push the tax rate up beyond a certain level and tax revenues fall in response. Tax payers will not keep working and producing if they can’t keep enough of their income. There are limits to what can be funded”.

These people need to understand that there would be hardly any progressive country that does not extend social welfare to poorer section of the society. In fact, most poorer sections of the society come from areas which don’t get proper remuneration of their services and are exploited by echelons of the society.