New Poll Shows Canadians Overwhelmingly Support Public Health Care

In a last-ditch effort to convince Canadians that their public
health care system should be privatized, Canadian Medical Association
(CMA) President Robert Ouellet has promised to "pull out all the stops"
during the association's annual meeting next week. Trouble is,
Ouellet's mission to lead the change to privatization is exactly the
opposite of what 86 percent of Canadians want.

A new poll conducted by the Toronto-based Nanos Research points to
overwhelming support -- 86.2 percent -- for strengthening public health
care rather than expanding for-profit services.

"With more than 8 in 10 Canadians supporting public solutions to
make public health care stronger, there is compelling evidence that
Canadians across all demographics would prefer a public over a
for-profit health care system," said Nik Nanos, president of Nanos
Research.

Nanos Research was commissioned by the Canadian Health Coalition
(CHC), a nonpartisan group that supports Canada's public health system,
to conduct a random telephone survey of 1,001 Canadians between April
25 and May 3. The margin of accuracy for a sample of 1,001 is +-3.1
percentage points.

Meanwhile, Canada's government just released a report titled "Healthy Canadians -- A Federal Report on Comparable Health Indicators 2008." Its findings almost identically mirror the CHC
polling results. In that report, a leading indicator points to the fact
that "Most Canadians (85.2 percent) aged 15 years and older reported
being 'very satisfied' or 'somewhat satisfied' with the way overall
health care services were provided, unchanged from 2005."

Michael McBane, national coordinator of the CHC,
commented: "Throughout our campaign, Canadians have told us they want
to keep our health care system public and to improve it with
made-in-Canada solutions. They also have told us they flat-out reject
Dr. Ouellet's proposal to provide us with American-style, two-tier
medicine. This poll certainly underlines that for us. Eighty-six
percent is a significant portion of the population. It is striking that
Dr. Ouellet could be so out of touch with the pulse of most Canadians."

McBane warned that Ouellet's latest effort to replace public health
care with a private system uses language that is misleading. "If
imported into Canada, Dr. Ouellet's ideas about activity-based funding,
'competition' and more private delivery would not yield European-style
care, but instead would lead us down the road to U.S.-style care."

McBane continued: "At the CMA's annual
meeting later this month, you will hear Ouellet talk about 'patient
centered' care, but he really means 'profit-centered' care. He will
talk about transformative health care -- which really means transforming
a public system to one that is private. He will also unveil results of
a CMA survey that he claims shows support for his new privatization scheme. In fact, the language used in the CMA survey was so vague and misleading that its results cannot possible be interpreted as support for more for-profit medicine."

McBane said that Ouellet, who owns or manages five private,
for-profit diagnostic clinics, has a history of misleading Canadians.
Recently, the CMA president toured Canada
touting the merits of what he called the European model of health care
-- cobbling together selective pieces of information from different
European systems to lull Canadians into accepting the idea of more
private, for-profit service.

"Dr. Ouellet needs to stop misleading Canadians and start telling
them what he's really up to -- privatizing our health care system," said
McBane. "His 'transformational change' agenda is his last kick at the
can before becoming the CMA's
past-president. Dr. Ouellet's privatized, for-profit vision won't solve
a single problem of our public health care -- and more importantly,
Canadians don't want it. And they've said this loud and clear."