As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates’ comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few.<\/p>\n
But no one will mention Claude Castonguay \u2014 perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn’t an American and hasn’t held office in over three decades.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But if you’re a Canadian who’s died waiting for a kidney transpant, or because they couldn’t get a specialist appointment to check out that mysterious growth, you might heard of the name.\u00a0 He’s Castonguay was the father of Canada’s single-payer healthcare system.<\/p>\n
And while American critics of single-payer who pay attention to the horror stories of Canadian healthcare get met with blizzard of non-sequitur stats from the usual US suspects, Castonguay has – well, a different perspective:<\/p>\n
Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.<\/p>\n
In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It’s as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.<\/p>\n
What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.<\/p>\n
Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n
<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And it doesn’t get any orphannier than when your father abandons you. We’ll get back to that.\u00a0 Let’s talk history: As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates’ comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}