Luckily for us, there are no attempts currently underway to introduce a public health-care system in the United States. If there were, we’d be inundated up here with disinformation from the U.S. media about the joys of private health care.

This is what happened in the early ’90s, when the Clinton administration tried to bring in public health care to replace America’s disastrous private system. The U.S. private health insurance lobby unleashed a massive campaign to scare Americans into believing a public system would be roughly equivalent to having the Soviet secret police run their hospitals.

A key part of that campaign involved discrediting the Canadian system, since many ordinary Americans had vaguely heard something about how all Canadians have access to high-quality medical care. (No doubt, that sounded pretty far-fetched to Americans. Why would a country spend its tax dollars like that? Are there no high-tech assault missiles to buy, no weapons of mass destruction to invest in?)

Suddenly the U.S. media were full of stories about how bad the Canadian health-care system was  stories that helped kickstart a debate in Canada about whether a privatized system might work better here.

I recall watching a televised debate on a U.S. network in which an “analyst” from the far-right Cato Institute in Washington made a number of blatantly false statements about the Canadian system; he even claimed that all hospitals in Ontario had been completely shut down for the month of December that year.

With U.S. politics focused almost exclusively this year on terrorism, the sniper and Washington’s plans to conquer Iraq, Canadians have been left to determine our future health-care system with little disinformation from south of the border.

The result has been an amazing process of nationwide consultations, in which the usually dominant voices of the privatizers have been drowned out by ordinary citizens coming forward passionately and in great numbers to insist on keeping our system strong  and public. Obviously Roy Romanow was listening, as his federally-commissioned report on health care revealed last week. It’s almost enough to make one optimistic about the possibilities of democracy.

Of course, those pushing privatization, led by Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper, are now gearing up to prevent the Romanow report from being implemented. Knowing Canadians don’t want a U.S.-style system, the privatizers here concentrate on making the case for private clinics and hospitals operating within a universal public system. Exactly how this introduction of a commercial element improves the health-care system is never explained, beyond vague assertions about giving us “alternative, innovative” options.

But where’s the “innovation”? Commercial hospitals don’t offer medical innovations  better techniques for, say, operating on the brain or delivering babies. The “innovation” is simply that there’s a group of shareholders involved who turn a profit. That’s nice for them, but it’s hard to see how this leaves patients better off.

Dr. Arnold S. Relman, a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, argues that the commercial element is the root of the problem with U.S. health care. He recently told a Canadian Senate committee: “No health-care system in the industrialized world is as heavily commercialized as [the U.S. system], and none is as expensive, inefficient and inequitable  or as unpopular. Indeed, just about the only parts of U.S. society happy with our current market-driven health-care system are the owners and investors in the for-profit industries now living off the system.”

A front-page story in The New York Times last week reported that, with private health insurance costs rising, even fully employed middle-class Americans are increasingly among the ranks of the uninsured, who now number 41 million. The article described one uninsured couple who put aside $30 a month to cover emergency medical needs for their 4-year-old daughter, but, the Times noted, “one ear infection would quickly empty the pot.”

There’s another reason to skip experimenting and get down to fixing public health care in this country  NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) will make it difficult for us to get rid of commercial health care once it’s fully established here. If, for instance, foreign private insurance companies were well established selling drug insurance in Canada, it would be harder for Ottawa to create a national pharmacare program, since the foreign insurers could sue Canada before a NAFTA tribunal for removing business opportunities.

We should act now, before the chance for a made-in-Canada solution  to borrow a phrase  disappears.

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...