John Rustand and his BC Conservative’s platform on health care is a reckless blueprint for our public health care system’s future. That’s because the BC Conservatives are committing to slashing overall spending on health care while ramping up a competing private care system.
Let’s start with Rustad’s endorsement of a report by multinational consulting company Deloitte that calls on Canada to lower its overall spending on healthcare by 2040.
In their election platform, the BC Conservatives centre one of their six key commitments – creating a modern, transparent, and accountable healthcare system – around Deloitte’s report and a radical cuts agenda that would require BC’s health spending be reduced to achieve lower overall healthcare spending nationally.
Now many may ask, who is Deloitte?
Well, in their client work, Deloitte has deep ties to Big Pharma and major-league U.S. private health care companies. Plus, they are part of a group of global corporations that make it their business to undermine public trust in governments and push solutions aimed at moving public dollars out of public services.
Simon Fraser University honourary doctorate winner and internationally-celebrated economist Mariana Mazzucato has described Deloitte and other similar firms that provide advice on public policy as having “no expertise in the areas that they’re advising in.”
Even worse, the Deloitte's of the world Mazzucato argues, "cost more than they seem to, and — over the long term — prevent the public sector developing in-house capabilities.”
Case in point, just look at Deloitte’s solution for Canada’s health care system.
By 2040, they recommend all governments strip out $200 billion from health care budgets, despite an aging and growing population. Critics say for B.C. this would amount to $4.1 billion less annually for health care by the end of the 16 years of restraint.
Make no mistake, with the BC Conservatives relying on the Deloittes of the world to guide their policy decisions, you can be sure cuts are coming to health care under a Rustad government.
And if that were not bad enough, there’s Rustad’s other campaign promise to spend public dollars on more private care.
Despite study after study showing that funnelling money into a private system only harms the public system it is competing against, BC Conservatives want to go back to that failed playbook. Why let science-based evidence get in the way?
According to a 2024 study in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, increases in privatization frequently corresponded with worse health outcomes for patients and that the scientific support for further privatization of health-care services is weak.
A 2021 Healthcare Policy study comparing Canada to other countries that also have competing public and private health care providers determined that both private for-profit insurance and private out-of-pocket financing was found to “negatively affect universality, equity, accessibility and quality of care.” Plus, “increased private financing was not associated with improved health outcomes, nor did it reduce health expenditure growth.”
Even more telling, a 2008 study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal comparing health care delivery in the United States to Canada’s found that even partial privatization would draw off resources from the public system and introduce the inequities that are seen south of the border.
And it just makes sense. Every dollar should go directly to patient care not to profit.
In the end, if Rustad’s cutting and privatization agenda for health care is fully implemented, it would spell disaster for patients, residents and health care workers.
This can’t happen. Especially for a system which has only begun to turn the corner on the damage that his old party – the BC Liberals – did to health care between 2001 and 2017.
We can’t risk BC Conservative cuts and privatization to our public health care system.
Not again.
Not a chance.