The private insurance debate in Canadian health policy

In addition to construing the purpose of the impugned legislation in practical terms of preserving the quality of the public system (and disagreeing with the Majority about the hypothesized effects of private insurance on the public system), the Minority also construed the purpose in principle, in terms of ensuring equality of access to medically necessary services throughout Quebec society.21 Wit [...] We use the lines of argument in the Court in a literary way to construct these positions, free of the constraints of legal argument and the burden of proving that various parties in the Court in fact held the positions we construct from their arguments. [...] Welfare Egalitarianism and Absolute Egalitarianism As we have seen, numerous experts and the Minority of the Supreme Court of Canada supported the prohibition on private insurance for publicly insured services on the grounds that the ban was necessary to preserve the quality of the publicly funded system. [...] Additionally, the Minority argued that, in principle, the removal of the prohibition would thwart the objective of the legislation and the purpose of the publicly funded system. [...] CONTRASTING WELFARE EGALITARIANISM AND ABSOLUTE EGALITARIANISM As we have described the positions so far, the difference between the welfare egalitarian and absolute egalitarian is rooted in a difference about the fundamental values of the publicly funded system, and in particular in different interpretations of the value of equality and in the relative weighting of welfare and equality.36 The wel