Abstract

In a recent Southam News - COMPAS poll on the role of the private versus public sectors in health care, 60 percent of Canadians expressed support for increased provision of health services by private suppliers. These findings do not surprise me. They represent the inevitable result of an increasingly informed public's reaction to the rationing of healthcare services that has become a defining feature of medicare in Canada. The realization that only the last of the five features promised in the Canada Health Act -- universal, comprehensive, portable, accessible and publicly administered - are being fulfilled is now being recognized by the public.