Private Health Care Is Better? Case at Dr. Chaoulli's Clinic Suggests Otherwise

It’s time to ask more questions about the increased involvement of the private sector in Canada’s health care system. Dr. Jacques Chaoulli and his health clinic came under fire yesterday in a coroner’s report into the death of man more than a year ago in the clinic’s waiting room. The training of clinic staff as well as its equipment appeared not to be up to standard while Dr. Chaoulli’s conduct—he did not attempt to reanimate the man—is a subject of an inquiry by the provincial body regulating doctors.

Dr. Chaoulli, you’ll remember, challenged Canada’s single-payer, universal health care system all the way to the Supreme Court, opening the door to the establishment of private health care in certain cases. Chaoulli and others argue that competition from the private sector will increase access and lower costs, a contention that is challenged by many health experts.

Certainly in this case it doesn’t look like Chaoulli’s clinic provided the kind of excellent health care proponents of privatization vaunt. Without a doubt members of the victim’s family must be asking what would have happened had he gone to a hospital emergency room where triage teams are trained to quickly size up a situation. It’s doubtful that a man turning blue would be told to sit and wait on a chair: while there's no doubt that it can take hours for non-urgent cases to be seen, life-threatening cases are evaluated and treated quickly in hospitals, observers agree.