Health Wonk Review: January 24, 2008

The latest issue of Health Wonk Review -- a regular collection of the best recent entries from health policy-related blogs -- is online today at the e-Care Management blog, hosted by Vince Kuraitis.

Canadian Medicine makes a brief appearance:

In the category of beware of what you ask for because you might just get it, Sam Solomon at Canadian Medicine points to an unintended consequence of universal healthcare. Is universal healthcare an illegal, dangerous monopoly? One Ontario lawsuit argues ‘yes’. Concluding that this is relatively uncharted territory in Canadian jurisprudence, he explains that the plaintiff’s

…lawyers insist Ontario’s universal healthcare system is putting citizens’ lives in danger. (OHIP provides universal healthcare insurance; OHIP has a monopoly over healthcare insurance; monopolies are detrimental to the public good; ergo OHIP is detrimental to the public good.)

The mention of "unintended consequence" is an interesting one.

Is healthcare rationing, as in the Flora v OHIP case, in fact an intentional method by which Canadian provinces' healthcare system limits spending? Some would allege that's the case. In Canadian jurisprudence, violations of people's rights under Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms may be judged in court to be justifiable if those violations are necessary in order to accomplish a goal that benefits society as a whole, and if that goal cannot be achieved any other way.

I suspect we're unlikely to ever see that argument used by the Crown in a case like Flora or any of the other Chaoulli-citing suits (it didn't work out well for Quebec in Chaoulli in 1995, as Dr Jacques Chaoulli himself explained to me last year), but it's nevertheless an interesting note to keep in mind when we're talking about rationing and rights.

Check out our website: www.nationalreviewofmedicine.com