May 15 is National Medicare Day across Canada
Ottawa – The National Union of Public and General Employees and its components will join with thousands of Canadians today on National Medicare Day, participating in a variety of nation-wide activities to demonstrate support for public medicare and to celebrate the best health care plan in the world.
May 15 has been designated National Medicare Day across the country.
NUPGE members will be marking the day by holding workplace canvasses, rallies outside hospitals and politicians’ offices and town hall meetings. They will also be distributing post cards and encircling provincial legislatures in red ribbon.
The theme of the day – A Call to Care: Patients not Profits – reflects the growing awareness that the spread of private for-profit health care threatens patients and will destroy our public medicare.
It’s been 40 years since Canada rejected for-profit health care and created no-profit medicare for everyone. The insurance companies and medical corporations still can’t believe it. They still work hard at trying to shake our faith our medicare.
They can’t. And they won’t. Not so long as we remember how it is when health care becomes a cash-and-carry, for-profit enterprise: care is expensive, inadequate and inequitable. Any hope of full care without financial ruin depends on whether or not you are covered by a private plan. Even then there are no guarantees.
When private for-profit insurance companies have to choose between their wealth and their health, we lose every time. Canadian-style medicare eliminates ever being faced with that choice.
Medicare is all ours. We made it. We like it. We want to keep it.
That’s something to celebrate.