Even after the fall of the the Berlin Wall, it was possible to find apologists for communism who would insist that the political system responsible for immeasurable human suffering wasn’t inherently flawed. There was nothing wrong with communism, you see, it was the implementation that had failed. Professor Colleen Flood’s defence of Canada’s creaking state health-care monopoly in the Huffington Post last week has a similar air of unreality.
Written with the sententiousness of a party tract, but none of the revolutionary élan, I don’t expect many readers followed her plodding piece to its perfunctory end. Fortunately, you don’t have to get that far to see the problems with her argument (to use the word loosely): each of the first three sentences contains a factual inaccuracy, and the blog goes downhill from there.
The legal case that has agitated Professor Flood does not “challenge … the publicly funded Canadian health system,” nor does it “allege that medicare violates the Charter.” The plaintiffs’ constitutional challenge is straightforward: if the government does not provide timely medical treatment, then it cannot at the same time legally prohibit patients who are suffering on long wait lists from taking control of their own health care and arranging treatment privately.