National Affairs
'Some day we'll stop pretending'
Claire Hoy
Thirty-six-year-old St. Catharines teacher Suzanne Aucoin was in the news recently for winning a fight she should never have had to contest. Even so, her receipt of a rare personal apology from the Ontario health ministry - along with a cheque for $76,018.23 - was not only a testament to this woman's extraordinary bravery, but in a small way helps illustrate the pitfalls of our fixation with a government monopoly health care at all costs.

Aucoin, for those who don't know her story, is fighting colon cancer that unfortunately has spread to her liver, lungs and lymph nodes.

She is being treated with Erbitux, a drug she first had to obtain at a private clinic in Buffalo and then later in Hamilton at her own expense after OHIP turned down her application for funding two years ago.

Despite the fact that her own doctor had recommended this particular drug, OHIP initially ruled that Erbitux - and other drugs suggested by her doctor - were experimental and therefore not eligible for funding. At the same time, however, other Canadians were being sent to the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo - at provincial expense - to get the drug.

Undeterred, Aucoin arranged to get the drug at a private clinic which is operated by a licensed cancer specialist who is also a staff member at Buffalo's Mercy Hospital. His clinic, by the way, provides the drug for about half the cost of Roswell Park but don't expect the province to start sending patients there instead because his clinic is private and we all know that in this country maintaining the façade of public-only funding always trumps saving money or actually helping people in need.

The problem, according to our bureaucrats, is that the private clinic wasn't licensed - even though the doctor was and an appeal board looking into Aucoin's complaint against the ruling found that neither New York state nor Buffalo's municipal laws do not require such a license for the clinic itself and that anyway, there was "no indication" that the clinic wasn't reputable.

It does makes some sense, of course, to check these things out, since we don't want to be spending public money on fly-by-night scam artists claiming to have discovered a cure for cancer.

But they knew that this clinic - and the doctor running it - were legitimate and they knew that the drug was too since they were providing it for other Ontario patients through the state-subsidized Roswell clinic.

Thankfully, it was Ontario Ombudsman Andrew Marin who came to Aucoin's assistance and finally brought Ontario Health Minister George Smitherman to his senses, or at least to a reasonable facsimile of sense.

Smitherman says the case has prompted his officials to review their out-of-country health coverage program to make it "work better for Ontario patients," adding in his released statement that there is a need for "greater information about funding for particular treatments, to ensure that decisions about funding for out-of-country treatment are consistent and based on evidence, and to improve the quality of reasons provided when requests are denied."

Mind you, Smitherman wasn't concerned enough about this woman's plight to actually tell her in person. Instead he ordered a high-level lackey, deputy health minister Ron Sapsford, to phone her. Aucoin told the Toronto Star that Sapsford "just sort of said ...'I realized you've had a difficult time.' I accepted it, I thanked him for it."

Surely we could have done a little better than that after what Smitherman and his bureaucrats put this woman through.

In an interview with the Star last week, she said, "I should never have had to deal with this, it takes all my energy to fight cancer. It rights a wrong on some levels but you cannot put a price tag on my mental strain and stress."

Exactly.

Nor can we really ever know how many other Ontarians have been victimized by this idiotic notion that just because a health service is being provided privately it musn't be any good. Indeed, it's likely fair to speculate that one of the reasons that particular drug - and who knows how many others - isn't available in Ontario is because we continue to insist on a government monopoly in these affairs.

The fact is more than one-third (and growing) of our country's health budget already is private, yet we continue this charade that only public health provision is good enough for us.

We're the only western democracy in the world with laws making private health services illegal. Most countries - most of which are rated more highly than Canada by the World Health Organization in terms of providing health care - have a mix of private and public and seem to have better health outcomes than we do at less cost.

Some day we'll stop pretending - and stop claiming we've got the world's best health care system - and get on with building one that works.