Dr. Brian Day challenged the province’s Medicare Protection Act, which prohibits additional billing and private insurance for medically necessary procedures.
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The British Columbia Supreme Court is expected to rule on appeal of a lower court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit by a Vancouver surgeon who advocates the right of patients to pay for private health care.
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Dr. Brian Day had challenged the province’s Medicare Protection Act, which prohibits additional billing and private insurance for medically necessary procedures.
The lawsuit argued that waiting times in the public system are too long and stated that it is a violation of patients’ constitutional right to life, liberty and security of person to prevent them from paying for services outside the public system.
Lawyers for BC and the federal governments argued that a two-tier system would favor those who can pay privately and erode Canada’s universal system.
After a four-year trial, the BC Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that attorneys for Day and other plaintiffs failed to show that the provincial law infringes on patients’ rights.
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The decision of the BC Court of Appeals is expected to be published this morning.
Day opened Cambie Surgery Center in 1996, saying he wanted to create more time in the operating room for surgeons who couldn’t get it in hospitals.
He launched his Charter challenge in 2009 and the case reached the British Columbia Supreme Court in 2016 with the support of four patients as co-plaintiffs.
In his written decision published in September 2020, Judge John Steeves noted that expert evidence presented at trial showed that doubling care in a private system would not decrease wait times in the public system.
“There is expert evidence that wait times would actually increase,” he wrote.
“This would cause greater inequality in access to timely care.”
Steeves acknowledged that some patients facing long wait times suffer from prolonged pain and a higher risk of deterioration, but found that a two-tier system would “encourage perverse incentives and unethical behavior by health care providers to misdirect patients.” certain patients from the public to the more lucrative private system.”
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