A years-long legal battle over access to private healthcare has come to an end after the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal from a doctor challenging British Columbia’s Medicare Protection Act.
The BC Medicare Protection Act sets rules for how physicians and other healthcare practitioners should bill for services provided under the province’s public health insurance, banning extra-billing and private insurance for medically necessary procedures.
Dr. Brian Day, CEO of the Cambie Surgery Centre, has been locked in a legal battle over these provisions since 2009, arguing that they prevent patients from accessing private care when wait times in the public system are too long.
His case argued that long wait times in the BC public healthcare system violated patients’ right to liberty, and security of the person under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The BC Supreme Court initially dismissed the case three years ago, with the provincial Court of Appeal upholding the ruling last year.
Now that Canada’s highest court has refused to hear an appeal, Day said that long wait times had been “forcibly embedded” into the medicare system.
“As a result of the Supreme Court’s failure to even consider the rights of Canadians suffering on wait lists, Canadians, such as the patient plaintiffs in our case who suffered such outcomes as permanent paralysis and death as they waited for care and justice, are being denied access to both,” he said in a statement via The Canadian Press.
Day also emphasized the need for reform, stating that Canada needs to bring itself in line with other publicly funded systems worldwide that offer complementary healthcare through legal private insurance.
“In a way, it’s a very sad day for Canadians,” he said in a separate statement to CBC News. “Wealthy Canadians have always gone down to the United States [for care], but where do middle income and lower income Canadians go? The answer is they’re not allowed to go anywhere. They stay and suffer and die on wait lists.”
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