by Lucy Hook
A legal ban – which prevents the purchase of private insurance for medically necessary services that are already covered by the public system – is being challenged by a well-known physician and proponent of private health-care.
In a lawsuit that is thought to have significant implications for the healthcare and insurance system in Canada, Dr Brian Day, of Cambie Surgery Centre in Vancouver, is challenging British Columbia’s restriction at the district’s Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Day argues that the ban violates patients’ constitutional rights by forcing them to endure extensive wait times that often exacerbate their health problems,
Canadian Press reports.
Lifting the ban on private insurance in these instances would ease pressure on the public system, which would free up resources, cut waiting times and improve the quality of care for all patients, Day argues.
The lawsuit was launched by Day in 2010 but has faced numerous delays, including an unsuccessful one-year hiatus which the two parties spent trying to reach an out-of-court settlement.
British Columbia’s Health Ministry, the defendant in the case, said its priority is to uphold the Medicare Protection Act and the benefits that it safeguards, but declined to comment further before the case is brought to trial,
Canadian Press reported.
Yanick Labrie, an economist affiliated with the Canadian Health Policy Institute and the Fraser Institute, told
Canadian Press that greater choice among insurance providers would encourage more competition, boosting efficiency and improving access, adding that the introduction of a new healthcare model would be a “revolution”.
Adam Lynes-Ford of the B.C. Health Coalition – an intervener in the case – said a win for Day would lead to a more US-style system, in which costs would escalate – as the limits on what doctors can charge patients would be lifted – and average wait times would increase.
If Day’s constitutional challenge is successful, the door will be swung wide open in British Columbia and in wider Canada for insurers to sell “what will amount to private queue-jumping insurance for those who can afford it”, Karen Palmer of Simon Fraser University’s faculty of health sciences said.
Colleen Flood, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, told
Canadian Press that the lawsuit was one of the biggest constitutional cases, “perhaps ever”, adding that medi-care itself was on trial.
The federal government has applied to be an intervener in the case,
Canadian Press reports, in light of the challenge to a fundamental principle of the Canadian health-care system.
Day’s lawsuit is not the first to challenge the status-quo of private health-care insurance access in Canada – in 2005, Quebec residents were granted access to private insurance by the Supreme Court of Canada after it was ruled that patients’ constitutional rights were being infringed by ‘excessive wait times’.
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