Profit Is Not the Cure: A Citizen's Guide to Saving Medicare

K.V. Nagarajan is a professor in the Department of Economics at
Laurentian University.

In this book, Maude Barlow trains her powerful citizen’s advocacy
microscope on the evolution of Canada’s health-care system. Starting
from before the beginning of medicare, she takes us through all the
battles that were fought to establish a universal, publicly funded
health-care system in Canada. Then she sketches with great alarm the
recent efforts to bring more private players into the system. Finally,
she calls for citizen activism to reverse the privatization trend and
preserve public medicare.

Barlow’s research and the arguments she advances in defence of her
positions are impressive. She writes in an accessible style, full of
passion and verve. How was life before medicare? It was grim, full of
suffering, premature death, and financial ruin. Saskatchewan citizens
rallied under Tommy Douglas and won the first universal system in 1961.
Public coverage became national by 1966. The principles of medicare were
entrenched through the Canada Health Act of 1984.

People have not been living happily ever after. Barlow shows that
medicare has faced deep budget cuts, erosion of coverage, and the recent
challenges of globalization and privatization. Corporate interests have
been gradually steering the system toward more private, for-profit
providers. Barlow argues against this trend and champions moving back to
a fully funded, more inclusive public health-care system, with coverage
extended to home care and pharmacare.

Once health care is in public hands, Barlow’s recipe calls for moving
toward a community clinic-based primary-care model and improving the
socioeconomic determinants of health. Her vision is a lofty one. Its
realization remains in the hands of politicians, which is why she calls
for citizens to unite against the corporate lobbyists.