Ch. 3 Public vs. Private Health care

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/healthcare/public_vs_private.html

This article came from the CBC website and it had a lot of interesting information about healthcare. The article was all about public and private health care and which is better. It was well explained with all of the statistical facts. It was also relevant to the chapter because this dealt with the third-party effects and we talked about this a lot throughout the chapter. This article tells us that the money going towards healthcare has increased three times over the past 30 years. It said just over $98.8 billion was spent by governments delivering public health care and about $43.2 billion was spent on private health care.
The article talks about both public and private health care and for public it says that it’s governed by the Canada Health Act. Public health care gives no direct charges which make it affordable, and all this money comes from the taxes that we pay. It says that healthcare is pretty consistent across the country. Ottawa has found that the best way to do that is by attaching conditions to the cash it transfers to the provinces to cover health care. This includes healthcare being portable, universal, accessible, and free from extra charges (for insured services). Portable means that you won’t lose your coverage when you go to different provinces and territories. Universal means that everyone is entitled to the insured health services provided by the provincial or territorial health care insurance plan. Accessible means that insured persons have reasonable access to insured hospitals dentals services etc.
Private health care means that you will have to pay for it with your own money. This means if you need a ride in an ambulance, you should expect to get a bill. This could either be very expensive for some people or very cheap for others. It depends which side you’re on. This also means that we will be paying less tax because the money from tax goes towards healthcare and since there is private healthcare, taxes will be decreased.
This article relates to chapter 3 because in this chapter we talk about third-party effects and public and private healthcare influences this. In public healthcare a third person or party is affected either positively or negatively. The third parties that are affected positively include the government, elderly or people that tend to get sick a lot, and sometimes poor people. Government benefits because they get to tax people, and elderly or sick people benefit because they don’t have to pay for their visits to either the doctor or hospital. This is true especially if people go to the doctor a lot because then the taxes are less, compared to how much you really should pay. Sometimes poor people benefit because then they don’t have to pay directly when getting a surgery. Tax payers don’t benefit because they pay taxes for other people who get hurt or sick and they have nothing to do with it. This is relevant because transactions between buyers and sellers may also have positive third-party effects.
In private healthcare tax payers benefit greatly because they pay less tax and the third-party effects are positive. However, for the government, elderly or people that tend to get sick a lot, and sometimes poor people are negatively affected. The government is negatively affected because it doesn’t get to tax people according to healthcare and as a result doesn’t receive as much money from the tax payer. Elderly or people that get sick lots have to pay for their visits to the doctor or hospital. For poor people it may be too expensive to pay for private health care and this may mean more deaths and that also is a third-party effect. All in all, it relates to the article because of third-party effects.
My personal reflection to this article is that it clearly tells us facts about public and private health care. This is especially important for students to know, because we will be paying taxes in the future and we will need to choose whether we pick a public or private health care system. However, to choose this we will need to know all the facts about public and private health care. This article is good at explaining that, and I learned a great deal about the health care system by reading this article. For the future I will need to know the third-party effects as well and by reading this article I learned most of the positive and negative effects consequently of public and private health care. In the future, I will be using everything I learned to become a great citizen, and let my thoughts be heard about the third-party effects when choosing a health care system. All in all, this was a fantastic article written by CBC news and I enjoyed learning from it.