The 1962 battle over Canadian health care: Labor pains

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1995 by Steven A. Lyons

By the 1960 provincial elections, Douglas was ready to act on his vision of universal, comprehensive, publicly administered health insurance. And the doctors of the province were equally ready to oppose him. Soon the only issue of the campaign was health care reform. But Douglas's party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was ultimately victorious, winning thirty-eight of the fifty-four seats in the legislature. Douglas took that as a mandate, and vigorously began to orchestrate his health. care plan. This incited the tightly organized doctors to attack the plan with even greater passion. And at the forefront of the fight was Dr. E.W. Barootes.

"At first people were apathetic, it was just another extension of health care services that Mr. Douglas had always preached about, until the doctors got in the game," Barootes recalls. "We had never been in this game before. We were clumsy, awkward, we were highly rhetorical, we used all the antics of bad politicians: exaggeration, dire threats of what might happen.

"Our concern was that once the government took over physician care services ... we would become technicians or tradesman being paid salaries by only one paymaster."

The opponents to implementation of Saskatchewan's health care system in the early sixties make last year's opposition to Clinton's attempt look tame by comparison. The insurance industry squashed US health care reform last year by exploiting the vision of a coldhearted, government-run bureaucracy. In Saskatchewan, the doctors appealed to a much more basic human instinct: survival.

As July 1, 1962 -- the day for implementing the plan -- approached, doctors put up large signs in their offices:

TO OUR PATIENTS:

This Office Will Be Closed After July 1st, 1962. We Do Not Intend To Carry On Practice Under The Saskatchewan Medical Care Insurance Act.

This threat was not made by any lunatic fringe. Nearly every Saskatchewan doctor announced his or her intention to leave the province, or at minimum to withhold services. And they made sure their patients knew of their intentions.

The implication was not lost on their patients. Once public health insurance was enacted, they would no longer receive health care.

Barootes: "We had public debates on television, we ran a propaganda campaign, and gradually people caught on to this, eh? The citizens formed 'Keep Our Doctors' committees. These sprouted up like mushrooms."

The slogan of these committees was "Political Medicine is Bad Medicine." Keep Our Doctors (KOD) committees focused their wrath on the government and anyone associated with the government's plan. The combination of the doctors' and the KOD committees' campaign raised public emotion to the boiling point.

Operating out of a hotel in Regina, one group had a twenty-four-hour telephone bank calling area citizens. With a recording of a crying baby in the background, a voice on the phone pleaded, "Help me, help me. My baby is dying and there is no doctor to help it." Government officials received threatening phone calls around the clock. The primary medical building in the capital was put up for sale: once health reform was enacted, all the doctors would be gone. The chairman of the government's Medical Care Insurance Commission had his family under twenty-four-hour security. His wife was pregnant but doctors refused to attend to her. The premier's house was painted with graffiti, and a caller threatened to harm his children unless the government changed course. (The premier happened to live half a block from Barootes. The threatening caller was informed "you can find them down the street, playing with the Barootes children!"