Medicare arguments - redux

I was living in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1960 - 61 during the “doctor strike” there. The NDP’s Saskatchewan plan was based on the Scandinavian and British ones. The doctors lost, and the rest, as they say, is history. But the naysayers were loud and determined to stop it, as were the Saskatchewan Medical Association. I recall a hilarious cartoon in the Regina Leader Post, depicting an African” witch doctor” applying for a position at the hospital there.
However, it was not long after the strike was over that the doctors noticed that their incomes actually increased, and they had no fee collection problems any longer, and the complaints ended both from doctors and patients.

When the Canada Medicare was introduced by Lester Pearson’s government, there was less opposition because of Saskatchewan’s pioneering experiment. In this area we did leapfrog the Americans, not imitate them, as we do in most other areas.

Some abuse of the system is inevitable, both by doctors and by patients. I recall growing up in a small village in Western Norway, where the doctor held court each Wednesday, in a local office. In those days, housewives did not work, and village life got rather boring at times. Thus, the highlight of their week was Wednesday’s doctor visit, and a standing joke was that one Wednesday, Mary, one of the regulars, was missing from the doctor’s waiting room. When one of the ladies asked where Mary was, she was told that she could not come because she was sick (!). There was more than a little truth in that one. Yet, who is to judge if you need to see the doctor. Not the doctor; once you are there, you have all ready usurped his allotted patient time.