The Quebec government has just announced that they want Claude Castonguay to look into how best to privatize the health care system. Wonderful! I do hope that Mr. Castonguay will take the opportunity to explain how getting the private sector involved will create new doctors and nurses out of thin air, or how it will minimize health care costs while maximizing the quality of service. Unless privatization can demonstrably do one of those things, it will simply be a matter of shifting the costs of health care to patients and the poor, and/or shifting the benefits to those who can afford to pay privately for better service, while entrenching companies seeking to profit from the health care system as a powerful interest group.

And when I say 'explain', I don't mean theoretical talk about the 'need to innovate', or about how competition is inherently better than having a monopoly, or the suggestion that the private sector is a magical source of revenue that does not reach into the pockets of citizens. I mean concrete explanations of how it would actually work better than what we have now.