Editor:
I’m perplexed by the peculiar and selective insistence that publicly funded health care should be exclusively delivered by government-owned facilities. It doesn’t reflect what’s happening in the real world. In fact, 70 per cent of long-term residential care in B.C. is provided through privately owned facilities – a long-standing, proven, cost-effective model.
Overall, less than a third of health care in Canada is delivered in publicly-owned facilities. When I see my doctor in her partner-owned clinic I receive care in a publicly-funded, private facility. It’s the same when I go to the laboratory for tests and diagnostic procedures.
The federal government routinely provides excellent health care to the RCMP, the Canadian Forces and federal prisoners at privately-owned facilities on contract. Similar arrangements exist for most provincial workers’ compensation programs. The innovative Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative contracts out thousands of surgeries to private facilities at public expense annually. It radically reduced the number of patients waiting for surgery and wait times dropped dramatically.
All of these positive examples have the same publicly-funded, privately-delivered service model as that proposed for the Trellis facility. I’m confident Trellis can deliver care services at the same quality as VCH at a lower cost, avoiding the incremental and inevitable additional bureaucracy and overhead costs of public facilities.
We need to learn from the European model of a publicly-funded mix of private and public health care service provision in all areas. It works far better than the slow and inefficient system some Canadians cling to.
Keith Maxwell, Sechelt
