Looking to Canada for health care reform

The landmark Canadian Supreme Court ruling in Chaoulli v. Quebec may stifle recent efforts to expand government control over health care in the U.S., contends a study from the Cato Institute, Washington, D.C., which dismisses the assumption that compulsory, universal health coverage is the key to universal access and equality of care.

Jacques Chaoulli, the study's author as well as a physician and lead counsel in the case, maintains that, '"co the extent that Canada has achieved equality in health care at all, it has done so ... through a 'leveling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation.'"

In Chaoulli, the court ruled that the nation's Medicare program 'violated Canadian patients' rights to 'life, liberty, and security of person'" by subjecting them to unreasonable, "intentional" and, in some cases, fatal waiting periods for treatment. The average waiting period of 17.7 weeks for surgery results from the state-run health care system's failure to meet the needs of all patients. Since Canada's Medicare monopoly effectively has outlawed any private health insurance, Chaoulli was forced to watch many of his patients suffer.

Chaoulli hopes this case will serve as a model for overturning other harmful government restrictions on patients' rights. The U.S.'s Medicare program contains a restriction similar to the one struck down by Canada's Supreme Court. American seniors "are effectively prohibited from purchasing Medicare-covered services from their doctors with their own funds."

In addition, Chaoutli argues that "more than 6,000 American patients die each year while waiting for suitable organs," and that "those waiting lists are caused by the U.S. Congress, which prohibits payments to organ providers and thereby dries up the supply of transplantable organs"

Recently, a Federal court used reasoning similar to that in Chaoulli when it reinstated the case Abigail Alliance v. Eschenbach, where terminally ill patients are suing the Food and Drug Administration for denying their right to access unproven--potentially life-saving--drugs. "That suit accuses the FDA of violating the patients' rights to life and liberty as protected by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It is my hope that [our case] can inform the court's deliberations and that the court will strike down this affront to patients' rights," concludes Chaoulli.

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