Fix it, or lose it

There are serious challenges ahead when it comes to health care in Canada. The good news is that young Canadians are prepared to take them on.

The Canadian Medical Association released the results of a poll that, at first glance, offers little reason for optimism about Canada's ailing health-care model. Nearly 75 per cent of respondents said they have fears about the effect that elderly baby boomers will have on the system. An aging society means reduced access to treatment, a lower quality of care and increased taxes to pay for it.

Yet what's encouraging is the willingness of Canadians -- notably young Canadians -- to do something about it. Evidently younger Canadians (those born after 1966) are not holding themselves hostage to the old idea that the current, government-run system is sacred and not to be tampered with. According to the poll, for example, younger Canadians would be willing to buy supplementary private insurance. Younger Canadians are not giving up on the Canadian ideal of universal health care but they are willing to entertain meaningful fixes. As outgoing Canadian Medical Association president Anne Doig put it, young Canadians have "a refreshing acknowledgement of reality."

Canadian health policy experts have long pointed to European countries, where there is a mix of private and public, as possible models for Canada. But because heath-care debates in Canada are so loaded with ideology, where talk of structural reform is attacked as "anti-Canadian," there has been little progress.

Transforming medicare might have been unthinkable to an older generation, but younger Canadians don't have the luxury of being nostalgic, not when they can't even find a family doctor. If we want to preserve our health-care system for all Canadians, then we must be willing to change it.