My family grew up in a backwoods province in Canada. They still had better health care than California |
Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, pictured in 1959, is known as the “Father of Medicare.” Under Douglas, Saskatchewan instituted the first single-payer health care plan in 1947. The idea spread to the rest of Canada.
It’s the holiday season, which means millions of Americans are being asked once again to select a health insurance plan through open enrollment. It’s a decision we’re supposed to make based on something impossible to know: How much medical care will we need in the next 12 months?
The pending end of subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, is only making this choice more brutal, as millions of Americans are being forced to consider downgrading their plans or giving up coverage entirely.
Whenever I go through this odd ritual of trying to pick the least-bad private-insurance plan, I think about how my mother’s home province of Saskatchewan, Canada, instituted the first single-payer health care plan in North America in 1947.
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Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, nicknamed the “Father of Medicare,” authored a plan to fund hospitalizations. A childhood accident that nearly cost him his leg convinced him that nobody should be denied health care because they can’t afford it. Douglas’ idea eventually grew to cover doctor visits and drugs.
My grandfather was a doctor in Nipawin, Saskatchewan, where he worked under Douglas’s system. He grew up in Montreal, and the government helped pay for medical school in exchange for a few years of work in the prairie province. I grew up hearing stories about him snowshoeing to house calls.
My mother, who was born in Saskatchewan, told me how she was frightened the first time she saw a flush toilet because she grew up........