Survey: Private healthcare
The Castanets Staff – July 16, 2022 / 7:30 am | History: 375929
Photo: Contributed
The British Columbia Court of Appeal has unanimously upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a Vancouver surgeon’s challenge to the Medicare Protection Act, saying the co-pay and private insurance bans do not violate the Charter.
The court found that the lower court judge erred in his right-to-life analysis and said in his ruling that the law’s provisions did deprive some patients not only of their right to security of person, but also their right to life.
However, the court ruled that the breach could be overridden by Section 1 of the Charter, which states that rights can be limited if they are shown to be reasonable in a democratic society.
Dr. Brian Day challenged the act, saying wait times in the public health system were too long and stopping patients from paying for these services outside the public system violated their rights.
Day launched his challenge to the Charter in 2009, and the case landed in the British Columbia Supreme Court in 2016 with the support of four patients as co-plaintiffs.
After a four-year trial, the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled in September 2020 that lawyers for Day and other plaintiffs failed to prove that patients’ rights were violated by the provincial act.
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