On February 16 finance minister Mike de Jong announced BC’s 2016 budget and this government’s plans for the Medical Services Plan (MSP) in the province. There was a great effort on the government’s part to reduce the cost of MSP payments for low-income families, but they’re missing the mark.
Green Party of British Columbia leader Andrew Weaver brought a petition created by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) to the government as the budget was being created; the petition asked for a change in how MSP premium payments are collected. More than 60,000 people signed the petition calling for the premiums to be scrapped and integrated into the already existing income-tax process.
CTF BC director Jordan Bateman spoke about this on CBC a few days before the budget was released. He argued that collapsing MSP premiums into the income-tax system would actually save a substantial amount of money; he estimated it to the sum of $100 million per year, based on the bureaucracy costs.
Bateman went on to say that at the very least, tying health-care payments into the income-tax system would eliminate charging someone who makes $35,000 a year the same as someone who is making $300,000 a year, which is still the case in this new budget.
BC premier Christy Clark has called the MSP system antiquated and has said that the way people pay for it doesn’t make a lot of sense. However, BC’s Liberal government has shut down the CTF proposal; in the budget’s release speech, de Jong said the government didn’t want BC residents to think health care was free.
The citizens of BC don’t need our government teaching us a lesson we don’t need on the cost of health care. We need fair taxation, and, currently, the MSP premiums are not fair.
In the truly global, connected world we live in, I think Canadians are extremely grateful for our public health-care system, and if we ever forget, all we need do is take a look across the border to see just how fortunate we are to have a government that believes in public health care. The finance minister was not appointed to teach the citizens of BC a lesson in finances. There is absolutely no reason for not seriously looking into the effectiveness of amalgamating health-care payments into the income-tax system.