How Do You Solve a Problem Like Health Care?

The perennial concern over how to pay for doctors and hospitals always gets politicians into a tizzy, even if they rarely do anything about it.

We only have two weeks left of campaign coverage (treasure it while you can), and the Toronto Star's Chantal Hébert sees three and makes a trend out of Liberal leaders “switching horses at the midway point in the hope of resuscitating a flagging campaign.” Michael Ignatieff's new-found focus on health care comes after three weeks of campaigning largely against the Tories' democratic deficit, but Hébert points out that Stéphane Dion's switch to the economic crisis in 2008 and Paul Martin painting Stephen Harper as a threat to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the latter half of the 2006 campaign didn't do much to bolster Liberal support. “[The] fate of medicare has hardly been a defining issue of Ignatieff’s leadership,” she says, predicting the new strategy will bear out much the same as before.

Of course, given that health care is first and foremost a provincial responsibility, the country's premiers ought to be the file's natural champions. But Kelly McParland of the National Post pillories Ontario's Dalton McGuinty for passing the buck on to Ottawa and blaming the feds for not doing enough to reform health care. “How about a few ideas from Queen’s Park, Mr. Premier? You know, the place that runs the hospitals and pays the doctors, and which levies the taxes that pay for most of it?”

Historian Michael Bliss, appearing in The Globe and Mail, supports Kim Campbell's fate-sealing sentiments about elections being no time to discuss serious issues, at least when it comes to health care. “Timid vote-seeking politicians are terrified of becoming off-side with public opinion, so they duck and weave and make impossible promises, and nothing happens,” says Bliss. The eminent professor then suggests the next government open a royal commission on health care that “would make recommendations that the government would use as the basis for a reform program that could become the central issue in the next election. With concrete proposals for change put in front of them, the voters could then decide yea or nay.”

But it's not like royal commissions have ever produced anything worthwhile, right?