Editorial

The Romanow Report and the Interests of Capital

The Romanow Report on the future of Medicare has been greeted with a great deal of fanfare by the Liberal government, with both Jean Chretien and all his potential successors pledging to implement the report's recommendations. The main recommendation was for an immediate infusion of $14 billion of federal money into the Medicare program, as well as corresponding provincial increases in spending on health care, in order to prevent the system from collapsing. Even the governments of Ontario and Alberta had no objection to this recommendation, although they did object to any provisions that would hold them responsible for how those monies are spent, claiming that health care is a provincial jurisdiction.

The Romanow Report was silent on the issue of where the additional funding would come from, but others have been quick to make their opinions known. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was the first off the mark, issuing its recommendations two days prior to the official release of the report. The IMF stated that Canada would risk losing the benefits of a decade of deficit cutting and debt reduction if it financed the additional funding by raising taxes or running a deficit. Instead, according to the IMF, the funding for health care should come at the expense of other social programs, such as unemployment insurance.

The IMF said nothing about the issue of private, for-profit health care, which has been one of its major demands over the past several years, leaving that issue to the Canadian Alliance and the Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia provincial governments. However, the IMF has demonstrated on numerous occasions that it has absolutely no concern about the quality of health care provided to the people of any country. Its sole concern has always been how to ensure that the world's largest corporations and financiers maximize their profits. Why then has it backed off from its demand that Canada open its health care system to American and European corporations?

During the entire 1990s the international financiers were demanding that Canada cut back its spending on health care and the Chretien Liberals dutifully complied. As a result, billions of dollars went into the pockets of wealthy bond holders, who used it to speculate in the stock markets and other financial markets where profits were soaring. However, since the spring of 2000 the financial markets have been performing rather poorly and corporations have been forced to look elsewhere to maximize their profits. Since the 1960s, Canada's system of publicly funded health care has been an extremely lucrative source of profits for various sectors of capital, including the pharmaceutical industry, the medical supplies industry and the construction industry. Those sectors also happen to include some of the most powerful monopolies in the world. It appears that they now hope to swell their coffers with billions of dollars of new spending on health care. The Chretien Liberals are again quick to comply.

However, the financiers are also eager to keep the flow of money coming in the form of debt payments, so they have warned the Liberals, through the IMF, not to do anything to reduce that source of revenue. Instead, the additional funding should come at the expense of working people in the form of raiding the unemployment insurance surplus and reducing the level of unemployment benefits. In this way the financiers get to have their cake and eat it too.

While the Romanow Report does make some minor recommendations on the issue of reducing the cost of pharmaceuticals (the fastest growing cost to the health care system), it falls short of challenging the right of the pharmaceutical monopolies to reap obscene profits from the misery of entire nations. Nor does it call for controls on the prices charged to the public health system for medical supplies, which are routinely marked up hundreds of times their actual value. As a result, the net effect of its implementation will not be creation of a high quality, cost-effective health care system, but rather one more mechanism by which to funnel money out of the pockets of the people and into the coffers of the rich.