National Pharmacare is Just Incremental Socialism

Both the NDP and the Liberal Party of Canada have been agitating for some time for a national pharmacare program. Despite the fact that the Trudeau liberals have run a four hundred billion dollar deficit this year, (and plan to run a deficit of at least a hundred billion next year), the social democrats want yet another sector of the Canadian economy nationalized by the state. You would think, given the failure of socialized medical insurance (Canada has some of the worst health care results among OECD nations because of state efforts to smother private health care options) the politicians and academics in this country would have learned their lesson. The market, not state control, is the only way forward. But it isn’t really about results with these people, it’s about ideology.

Incremental socialism is a strategy by communists to establish total state control over the economy one industry at a time. And after all, why shouldn’t Canadians have “free dental care” if we have “free health care”. Heck, why shouldn’t we have free everything? Free ponies, free money. Let’s throw a party. Who can argue with free stuff? Unfortunately there is very little as expensive as free stuff from the government, as the long-suffering Canadian taxpayer knows. With a substantial portion of the Canadian public on the receiving end of government largess, be it, unemployed parents, with their $500 per month per child subsidies and welfare checks, or the ever-expanding political class of bureaucrats, politicians, and academics, the people left paying taxes are under ever-increasing pressure to shoulder the burden of runaway government spending. It is profoundly unfair to ask these struggling workers and businessmen to carry yet another burden.

And what will happen with the opioid epidemic, already costing so many Canadians their lives and livelihoods, when pharmaceutical drugs become free to the end-user? When the price to the end-user is free, demand increases substantially. This is a real problem with the Canadian health care system already, where people go to the doctor with the sniffles just because it costs nothing, and hey who knows. But then there is a finite amount of money budgeted by the province for health care, and these resources are eaten up by unnecessary visits so that when it comes time to pay for critical care people are languishing for months or even years on waitlists. If the cost for a prescription of percocet is zero, then that is only going to encourage both use and abuse. We already see opportunists getting…