As he prepares to make his exit from the political stage, Ralph Klein can finally be his own man. Having announced his retirement, he can now be guided by nothing more than his own moral compass.

And so, last week, the Alberta premier reached somewhere deep inside himself and found the courage to address that seemingly insoluble problem that has long bedevilled the Canadian health-care system: how to enable the rich to jump to the front of the queue.

Make no mistake. That’s what Klein’s “reform” is about. His key proposal is to “let individuals pay privately for faster access.”

This defies one of the basic principles of our medicare system, which requires that all citizens have equal access, without extra charge, to medically necessary services.

Klein’s proposed reform addresses a complaint long nurtured by some well-heeled Canadians. It’s often expressed this way: I can get a hip replacement for my dog faster than I can get one for myself.

One can appreciate the frustration of the rich. Accustomed to being able to buy the finest things and the fastest service, they feel annoyed that, when it comes to health, their platinum cards leave them no more powerful than the next person. Why don’t the rules of the marketplace apply to health care, too?

There’s a reason.

A huge — and largely hidden — part of our health-care costs are actually paid outside the marketplace. This is partly because health is so vital to human well-being that we’ve collectively decided, using our democratic voting power, not to leave health to the whims of the marketplace. It’s also simply too costly to pay all health costs privately.

So we collectively pay through our tax dollars to heavily subsidize the enormous cost of educating our doctors.

We also collectively pay the costs of constructing and maintaining hospitals and equipping them with the latest technologies. And we pay collectively for government-funded medical research. These huge, hidden public subsidies exist even in the U.S., where other parts of the system are largely privatized.

So, the taxpaying public — by any reasonable standard of fairness — should have full access to the system they’ve paid for.

But if, as Klein proposes, doctors are allowed to have two sets of clients — one paying and one not paying — they’ll inevitably offer faster, preferential treatment to their paying clients. This means their non-paying clients will face longer waiting times, reducing them to a second-class status in a system they’ve paid for.

The wonderful thing about the Canadian system is that it operates on a higher principle than the marketplace; access is determined by human need, not money. We can improve it without tampering with this profoundly important principle.

The baffling question is why Klein wants to be remembered for moving us closer to the U.S. system, where a rich person’s dog can get better medical treatment than tens of millions of Americans.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...