Today our health care remains a hostage of politicians and bureaucrats who use it as a bargaining tool for elections and contract negotiations. It was an easy take; we gave up our freedom for the promised security of Medicare. We allowed a government social program to transform the work of doctors and the health of patients into so-called social goods. We sacrificed a voluntary, mutually beneficial doctor-patient relationship to the notion of getting something for nothing. The result is a take what you get health care system.

Medicare supporters continue to tell us that health care is not a commodity but a social good. I think health care is a commodity whether it’s purchased and sold by governments or individuals. The question we should be asking ourselves is: who benefits the most from this commodity under a government monopoly? Is it doctors and patients or the bureaucrats, labour unions, and special interest groups?

Medicare supporters tell us that socialized medicine is built on a moral high ground because it distributes health care based on need and embodies the Canadian values of fairness and equality. Perceptions of need, fairness, and equality are in the eyes of the beholder. In a socialized health care system are the beholders doctors and patients or politicians and bureaucrats?

If government abdicates its role in protecting individual rights and freedoms then whose morality will we be forced to adopt and whose interests will we be forced to serve, if not our own?

Freeing our health care from the binds of Medicare isn’t going to be easy, but it can be done. It starts by sending our politicians this message: I’m taking back my health care and the individual rights and freedoms that go along with it.

Four patients have joined Dr. Brian Day’s case regarding health care legislation and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms currently filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. There are similar court cases involving two patients in Alberta and two patients in Ontario.