A Usenet persona calling itself BCITORGB wrote:

Scott allow me to continue your education:

http://www.civitas.org.uk

The Canadian Health Act of 1984... denies federal support to provinces
that allow extra-billing within their insurance schemes and effectively
forbids private or opted-out practitioners from billing beyond
provincially man-dated fee schedules.

The 1984 Act also defines and solidifies the principles of medicare,
including:

*comprehensiveness (provinces must provide medically necessary hospital
and physician services),
*universality (100 per cent of provincial residents are entitled to the
plan),
*accessibility (there should be reasonable access to services, not
impeded by user charges or extra billing),
*portability (protection for Canadians travelling outside of their home
province), and *public administration (provinces must administer and
operate health plan on a non-profit basis) (Klatt, 2002)...

Healthcare providers are predominantly private [SCOTT, PLEASE NOTE!],
but are funded by public monies via provincial budgets. Hospital
systems are largely private non-profit organizations with their own
governance structures (usually supervised by a community board or
trustees)... that receive an annual global operating budget from the
provinces...

Physicians are mostly in private practice and remunerated on a
fee-for-service basis [SCOTT: NOTE] (with an imposed cap to prevent
excessive utilization and costs) by the provincial health
plan...However, physicians that choose to opt out of the system cannot
procure any public monies, and are forbidden from billing above
negotiated "Schedule of Benefits" pricing which the "opted in"
physicians are subject to. In other words, private physicians cannot
bill above the fee schedules for medicare physicians. Therefore, opting
out is risky for physicians and uptake is low.

Scott, there you have it. Please stop making things up, OK.

I've analyzed all this in another post...and debunked your arguments too.
--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

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© 2005 Scott Weiser