“….overcoming the many barriers and interest groups opposed to universal medicare was a hard-won political war waged over many years, particularly with respect to medical associations who fought tooth and nail against the prospect of a public health care system and various politicians who were ideologically in favour of maintaining a significant role for private health insurance. The melange of laws that exist across the provinces, and the Canada Health Act itself, are thus a product of the particular history and context of medicare, including political accommodations necessary to bring doctors into the public plan (for example, they are not public employees but independent contractors mostly paid on a fee-for-service basis with still relatively little governmental control over their clinical decision-making).”
