The quest to be lucrative–not illegal

By Cam Cotton-O’Brien

As the student population preps to get wildly–though with luck not criminally–drunk on Bermuda Shorts Day, a similar situation presents itself as a new private health clinic in Calgary aims to be lucrative, not illegal.

The Copeman Healthcare Centre is set to open its doors in Calgary this coming fall. The clinic will cater to the moneyed of Calgary, charging a yearly fee for its services–which will be a team-based approach to, supposedly, preventative health care. The legality of their services are tentative, but an inquiry into two of the company’s other ventures–both located in Vancouver–deemed that the clinic wasn’t in violation of Canadian law.

The reason that the clinic is able to offer health care services privately, which seems, on initial prevue, to be the precise opposite of Canada’s legally-enforced Medicare system, is because they are not charging individuals for necessary treatment. Rather, their clientele pays a yearly fee, for which they receive the aforementioned preventative health care (visits to a dietician, et cetera) as well as having access to a number of physicians for proper medical needs.

This is the sketchy part. Because it would be against the law to charge individuals for these services, the company bills the government. Thus, it is only the ability to access the services from those particular doctors that people are paying for, not the services themselves, and so it is legal in the same way a 45-year-old man can date an 18-year-old girl.

The opening of these clinics has caused considerable controversy in Vancouver and it will likely do the same in Calgary. Already, there are groups worried that it will further exacerbate the doctor shortage by staffing the new clinic with some eight doctors from around the city. Responding to these claims, the owner of the company, Don Copeman, has argued that opening the clinic will in fact serve to ease the burden of Calgary’s health care system by introducing preventative medicine and thereby increasing the health of Calgarians. An interesting argument, perhaps, until one considers that the clinic is initially inviting only 500 of this city’s most upright residents to join.

The greatest problem with this tidy little profit maker isn’t the minutiae of legal technicalities that are exposed by it. The real concern is what is at stake–the much lauded, often decried, universal health care system. While certainly there are problems with the system and numerous detractors to point them out, it remains a bad idea to begin to privatize medicine–even to let the sneaky little system creep in–as this clinic so brilliantly exemplifies.

The notion that the clinic is not in contravention of the Medicare system because it isn’t charging clients for specific medical treatments is bogus. They pay to access the system, and therefore are paying for those services. This method of providing health care is clearly contrary to the idea of equal access for all and thus the philosophical basis of medicine in Canada–allowing this clinic to open elevates 500 citizens above the rest in terms of access to health care.

Opening this clinic also distracts us from what should be the focus of health care in this province–an expansion of capacity and services so that there are enough medical personnel and hospital beds to adequately treat everyone. If a concerted effort were made towards this goal, the question of a private health clinic should never arise. If all citizens were provided with adequate, timely health care, then a private clinic would become an expensive redundancy.

Certainly, the accusations of opening a private clinic being contrary to Medicare are legitimate, but it is also the case that failing to provide adequate services in the first place is also in violation of the lofty tradition.

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