A few years ago, a middle-aged Louisiana man committed what he considered a successful robbery: he slipped the teller at the local post office a robbery note and then waited outside for the police to arrive. He was arrested, convicted and sent to jail — where he was able to get the medical treatment he desperately needed for his colon cancer, but couldn’t afford.

I read about this story in the National Post, where it seemed to be included mostly for its titillating value as a wacky little crime story. (The crazy things people do!)

But it has always struck me as being a tale that should be emblazoned into the psyche of all Canadians.

At the very least, it’s the kind of story that we should keep front and centre as we gear up for a few days of perhaps mind-numbing television featuring our elected politicians squabbling over how to fix our health-care system.

There’s been speculation about whether having the proceedings televised will hamper the deal-making possibilities. But I fear something else — that in the ongoing blur of apparently endless, insoluble bickering, Canadians will just tune out. In the haze of political posturing and gamesmanship, we’ll lose sight of what’s at stake here — the preservation of a public system that provides all Canadians with access to medical care. (No jail time required.)

This is in sharp contrast to the largely private health-care system in the U.S., where infant mortality is 34 per cent higher than ours, and U.S. life expectancy 2.4 years lower. Vincente Navarro, a health policy professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, notes that some 100,000 Americans die each year because they can’t afford necessary medical treatment.

Among other things, this suggests that an American has a higher chance of dying from lack of health insurance than from a terrorist attack — although one would have little sense of this from watching U.S. television. Indeed, one would have little sense that the U.S. health-care system is one of the worst in the developed world — at least as far as the 43 million uninsured Americans are concerned.

Meanwhile, here in Canada, anyone following the news recently might be left with the impression that our health-care system is barely functional.

This is largely because of a small but influential group of analysts, many operating out of business-funded think tanks, who for years have relentlessly pushed the idea that Canada’s public health-care system is unworkable, and can only be saved by allowing large parts of it to be privatized.

As a result, many Canadians who have never had any actual problems with the health-care system have been scared into believing the whole thing is falling apart and won’t be there for them when they need it.

Health-care analyst Dr. Michael Rachlis, author of Prescription For Excellence, argues that the problems have been exaggerated and that, overall, Canada’s system works well.

Rachlis says that parts of medicare certainly need fixing, and that this can best be done by adopting more efficient delivery systems within the public system — reforms that are already being implemented and that don’t have to be expensive. He points, for instance, to the establishment (in Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg and Victoria) of health centres that exclusively treat breast disease and that have reduced patient wait times by 70 per cent.

Attempts like this to reform the system just seem to annoy Jack Mintz, CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute, who branded medicare “a rigid Soviet-style system” in Canadian Business last month.

Mintz insists we need “market-based” incentives, like having “teams of doctors compete with each other.”

But are market-based incentives really the answer? The new breast centres seem to be producing excellent results without offering doctors stock options or dividing them into teams to see who can perform the most mastectomies.Health professionals — doctors, nurses, midwives — clearly want to be financially compensated for their work, but they also appear to be motivated by non-market considerations like the desire to do a good job and to help patients.

Mintz also believes user fees are necessary to deter patients from consuming too much free health care. If governments buy more MRIs, he argues, “they will then find far more patients at the doorstep since the service is free.” After all, who would turn down the chance for a free MRI, not to mention a free catheterization or colonoscopy?

Mintz suggests that Canadians may get so fed up with medicare they’ll turn to “a new solution altogether.”

Of course, there’s always the Louisiana solution. Let’s never forget that.

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...