Through the 1990s, Ralph Klein's Alberta Tories squeezed health care. They closed the general hospital in Calgary.
Last year, they blew it up.
This year, they are openly musing about introducing new, privately-run hospitals.
So that is our first lesson -- when Tories dynamite perfectly good hospitals, you can bet the private sector is not far behind.
The second lesson is that this represents a full-scale assault on universally accessible health care.
Klein and his backers in the business press deny that the introduction of privately-run hospitals is a threat to medicare.
What a crock. Where is the model for relying on the private sector?
The only possible model is the United States, the advanced capitalist country which, more than any other, relies on the private delivery of health care services.
And in what country is there the greatest inequality in the delivery of health care services.
Again, it is the United States.
When this decade began, 30 million Americans had no access to health insurance.
This year, the figure climbed above 44 million.
Open the door to the private sector in hospitals, and that type of inequality will not be far behind.
The private sector might enter the door as "non-profit" deliverers of health care.
The only reason private capital gets invested, ultimately, is to make profit.
And the only way to make a profit in the health care industry is to deliver better services to the rich, and to ignore the poor.
We are told that this has to do with efficiency.
This is simply a lie.
Not only does the United States have the most unequal delivery of health care in the western world -- it has the least efficient. No country spends more per person on health care than the United States. No country delivers less.
Opening the door to the private sector is about putting profit before people, full stop.
No choice for the poor
Some argue that privatizing health care is all about choice. Provide a publicly run system that all can access, but give people the "choice" of jumping the queue and paying for, better, earlier or different types of treatment in the privately-run sector.
What could be the harm in that?
To see the harm, we need only turn to the example of Britain.
There have always been private hospitals in Britain, but until recently they were a minor factor in the health care system.
But after two decades of cuts to the public system, suddenly, there are now more beds in private hospitals than in public -- 443,000 to 356,000.
Private hospitals account for about a quarter of all health and social care spending in Britain. About 20 per cent of elective surgery is done privately.
Twenty percent of this is paid for out of pocket by individuals.
Now look behind these statistics.
If you are rich, you can pony up the big bucks, schedule an operation at an early date, with the best doctor and jump the queue.
But most doctors operate in both the public and the private sector.
As they agree to more and more private operations, they are available for fewer and fewer public operations.
The more rich queue-jumpers, in other words, the longer the wait for the working class and the poor. As one commentator in the Globe and Mail put it:
"A patient calling their office for any oppointment or to schedule surgery is asked whether they are going public or private. The private patient goes to the head of the queue. The public patient goes on the waiting list. Both get roughly the same care, only one gets it a lot sooner. The difference can be months."
With some illnesses, that difference can be the difference between life and death.
That is the door that Klein is opening.
The Liberals are to blame
The federal Liberals are making loud noises about how outrageous it is for Klein to contemplate opening the health care door to the private sector.
But these hypocritical Liberals have been responsible for the biggest every cuts to funding for health care this country has ever seen.
If they were really opposed to Klein, they would restore the tens of billions they have stolen from health care this decade.
But they have no intention of doing this.
They are just as market-mad as Klein.
These same Liberals are leading the Canadian delegation at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle, where countries around the world will greedily put health, education and welfare on the altar of greed and the market.
The Liberals are projecting a $95-billion surplus over the next five years.
We need to build a movement that demands that this surplus be used to rebuild our tattered social programs, including health care.