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Can Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canada’s 13 premiers and territorial leaders repair our well being care system that many years of federal and provincial governments of all political stripes broke?

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Obviously it may well’t all be finished without delay after they collect in Ottawa Feb. 7 to set the stage for a deal the place the federal authorities will improve funding to the provinces and territories in return for circumstances on that funding they must comply with individually.

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The issues return many years. Fixing them will take years.

The query is whether or not the agreements arrived at immediately will level Canadian well being care in the fitting route, with efficient reforms.

Politicians going again many years had been chargeable for creating the myths that Canada’s well being system care is free, publicly-funded and one of the best on this planet.

In actuality, our system is dear in comparison with different international locations all over the world with comparable common well being care techniques.

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Thirty per cent of our well being care is privately funded.

While there are various constructive examples of wonderful well being care — regardless of relatively than due to the present system — internationally, Canada’s medical outcomes general are mediocre in comparison with comparable international locations.

Canadians face a number of the longest medical wait instances for therapy within the developed world in a system with too few frontline well being care suppliers and inadequate working rooms and tools, comparable to MRIs.

The cause Canada has too few medical doctors is because of deliberate insurance policies by provincial governments beginning within the Nineties, when Ottawa diminished switch funds to the provinces so as to stability the federal finances that was uncontrolled on the time.

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The idea — promoted by so-called well being care economists inside Canada’s overly bureaucratized well being care system — was that graduating fewer medical doctors by decreasing the general public funding of medical colleges, would imply decrease prices as a result of there can be fewer medical doctors treating sufferers and ordering assessments.

What occurred as an alternative is that the variety of Canadians with out household medical doctors skyrocketed.

That resulted in larger prices, as a result of with out household medical doctors, sufferers find yourself in hospital emergency rooms for each minor and extra critical well being care points — the place it’s far costlier to deal with them.

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While we don’t have sufficient household medical doctors or nurses — many burned out by the COVID-19 pandemic — we do have an overabundance of highly-paid, empire-building authorities well being care bureaucrats, consistently creating new kinds for medical doctors to fill out, slicing into the time they look after sufferers.

Data sharing of well being care info usually borders on the absurd.

At the peak of the pandemic, governments had been in lots of circumstances, compiling and sharing info by fax machine, apparently having missed the pc age.

Transferring affected person’s medical histories from paper to digital data has been laboriously sluggish and costly, with governments presiding over the method repeatedly losing money and time due to incompetence.

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Overcrowded emergency rooms and hallway medication had been created by years of provincial governments failing to create adequate continual and long-term care beds, that means individuals ended up in acute care hospitals as a result of there was nowhere else for them to go.

It doesn’t assist when fear-mongering defenders of the damaged establishment in well being care painting any makes an attempt at reform as creating two-tier, American-style well being care, which nobody who understands the problems is speaking about.

Let’s all hope for some significant breakthroughs on these points within the newest spherical of federal-provincial-territorial negotiations.

But don’t maintain your breath.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com