Back in the late '90s, when I was the manager of government relations for the Ontario Medical Association, we had an expression those of us who wanted to see a parallel private health-care system liked to toss around.
Especially when negotiations with government had gone off the rails.
That expression was: Fund it or free it.
Or to put it another way: If there isn't enough money to adequately pay for our public health-care system and properly deal with the challenges of looking after the sick and elderly - in particular, the escalating costs of new technology and the sheer numbers of our growing and aging population -then government should be open to looking at new ways of funding the system.
But instead of doing something that made sense, health minister after health minister would bash the doctors and the doctors would fight back.
In the end, both sides would reach an agreement that was fair and reasonable - totally ignoring the reality of a health-care system that was clearly unsustainable.
So here we are in the spring of 2012.
Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews is once again bashing doctors and doctors are once again fighting back - mostly through the media.
While these kinds of public relations battles might be good news for consultants such as me, they do little to answer the fundamental question: Who is going to pay for all this?
The minister clearly believes that doctors should.
This is why she has moved so swiftly, cutting millions of dollars in physician fees, and in short setting collective bargaining back 25 years.
For their part, doctors have not faced a threat this big since then premier David Peterson banned balanced billing in 1986, using the newly minted Canada Health Act to defeat the doctors and win the battle - if not the war.
Unfortunately for Deb Matthews, she made one crucial miscalculation.
By refusing to negotiate these changes with the Ontario Medical Association, or agreeing to binding arbitration, she has violated the spirit of the Canada Health Act.
The act clearly states that each provincial government must negotiate an agreement with the doctors' representative - in this case, the OMA - or agree to conciliation or binding arbitration.
This is why the minister has gone public with her offer to the Ontario Medical Association to return to the table and negotiate an agreement.
For the first time, the minister understands the implications of what she has done.
Unfortunately for Matthews, the doctors don't appear to be in a rush to accommodate her.
As someone a lot smarter than me once said, you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
All of which brings us back to that business about funding it or freeing it.
It would be sweet justice, indeed, if Dr. Dalton and Dr. Matthews go down in history as the two people most responsible for opening the door to private health care here in Ontario.
By playing politics with the health care of every citizen, the premier and his health minister have now made possible what those of us advocating for just such a parallel private system have been pushing for during the past two decades.
And don't for a minute think that the public - especially the boomers and zoomers - isn't on side with this.
Even the McGuinty government knows this to be true.
All of which begs the question:
If they can't or won't fund it, will they have the courage to free it?
© 2012 London Free Press