Massive cavities, mouthfuls of broken teeth, bleeding gums and abscesses — they’re just some of the serious dental issues Dr. Melvin Lee has treated in less than two weeks of providing care under Canada’s new public dental insurance plan.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    I really don’t understand why they went with a private insurance company to deliver this program … they really had to shoehorn a private company into a public service in order to make it happen. Cut out the private company and it would likely save more money in the long run … money that could be turned around to hire government staff and a new government department to run the program. Instead of having a private company partly work to deliver the program and partly work to try to turn a profit by degrading the service for their monetary benefit.

    There will always be fat to the system no matter who delivers it … the difference is that if you allow private companies into these situations, they’ll do everything in their power to deride the new system and turn into something that will only benefit them.

    • MacroCyclo@lemmy.ca
      0·
      6 months ago

      If I had to guess it was probably done due to expediency. Starting something like this from scratch is going to take a lot more time than outsourcing. This program got implemented pretty quick. I agree though, longterm it is excess.

      • Hacksaw@lemmy.ca
        0·
        6 months ago

        I doubt it. The provincial governments already run massive “health insurance” programs in Canada, this would not have been an impossible task to add a small dental program that only covers a fraction of the population to that.

        Private “health insurance” cannot be cheaper than public. You have expenses which are the cost of people going to the dentist. And you have revenues, which are paid for through taxes. The only math that changes is that private insurance also adds profit for shareholders on top.

        This is purely about privatizing Canadian healthcare.