Saskatchewan Showed Canada
Canada’s national health insurance system started in one province in
1962. The father of Medicare, as the Canadian system is called, is Tommy Douglas,
former premier of Saskatchewan and founder of Canada’s New Democratic
Party. Douglas was elected premier of Saskatchewan in 1944. In his first four
years of office, he paid off the provincial debt, created a province wide
hospitalization plan, paved the roads and provided electricity and sewage
pipes to all residents.
By 1961, Douglas was ready to act on his vision of universal, comprehensive and publicly administered health insurance. On the day his health care program was to be implemented, July 1, 1962, Saskatchewan doctors organized a massive protest strike against it. What the government called “universal coverage,” doctors called “compulsory state medicine.”
Doctors threatened to leave the country. Keep Our Doctors committees compared universal medical coverage to “Karl Marx and his Communistic Theories.” Recordings went out on people’s telephones with a crying baby in the background and a voice pleading, “Help me. My baby is dying and there is no doctor to help it.”
Alan Blakeney, a minister in Douglas’ cabinet, said, “I have never seen anything approaching this level of public hysteria about an issue. … The hysteria was further whipped up by the newspapers. … I would guess that 75 percent of the people would have wanted to suspend the Medical Care Act.”
But Tommy Douglas proved to all of Canada that it was possible to develop and finance a universal health care system. In 1968, Medicare was instituted in all of Canada.
Today, Canada’s single payer health insurance regularly wins approval ratings of 90 percent and more.
