Economic Meaning
Cost, Price and Value

Important clarification about cost, price and value ... almost nothing is actully 'free'

Burgess COMMENTARY
Very good and important clarification ... in my own analytical work I try to be very careful to differentiate between cost, price and value.
Peter Burgess

Kevin Bishop • a day ago

Robert, please correct your article's statement about health care in Canada.

Contrary to your comment, repeated often elsewhere, health care in Canada (and most other first-world nations) is NOT free. It is financed from general revenues of the federal government. Most provinces handle it through the income tax system while some, like B.C., charge a separate medical premium which is in the range of a few hundred dollars a month for family coverage - and low income families pay nothing for coverage - so EVERYONE is covered. We just don't have to pay user fees for doctors' visits, tests or hospital stays, or pay exorbitant private insurer rates as in the broken American system.

Having said that, the vast majority here would have it no other way (and I mean vast, as support for our 'single-payer' universal health care crosses all party lines). No government, of any political stripe, would dare touch our universal health care. (And therein lies another fundamental difference between Canada and America. Here, politicians aren't completely captured by runaway donor financing, so they actually have to take citizens' views into account, as opposed to American politicians who can simply ignore voters' wishes, as seen in the obscene tax bill just passed.)

In survey after survey of Canadians, our health care system comes out on top for what is best about Canada and the most admired historical Canadian is Tommy Douglas (Keifer Sutherland's grandfather..), the politician who is considered the father of our universal health care system. After introducing it as premier in Saskatchewan in 1962, he went on to federal politics where he 'convinced' the minority federal government to adopt it nationally in 1965.