Health care U-turn?

Harper backs medicare law:

In an effort to defuse an issue that derailed him during the final weeks of last year's federal election campaign, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper announced yesterday that he now fully supports both the Canada Health Act and the role of the federal government in medicare. It was a dramatic shift for a man who four years ago advised Alberta to withdraw from medicare and who two years ago wrote that Ottawa should scrap the Canada Health Act.

This one's fair enough: Harper did use to say those things. As did a lot of conservatives. But Harper's been on a different tack for some time now - months, if not years. So there's no actual news in Walkom's story, other than Harper's a-little-too-transparent attempt to pull a Sister-Souljah with his Fraser Institute hosts by dissing the Harris-Manning paper. Is this a flip-flop? Maybe. But in his Calgary speech, Harper makes a point that perhaps suggests a genuine rethink. I'm paraphrasing, but the gist of it was this: The Canada Health Act is not the obstacle to health care reform that a lot of conservatives believed. Some of us have been saying this for some time -- there's room for radical, market-oriented reform within the Act, making full use of competition, consumer choice, etc. It just has to be publicly funded -- ie no user fees or private insurance for services covered by medicare. That's the right approach, in my opinion. It's also, as Harper stressed, the politically expedient approach. But the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.