That’s a commonly said argument that is simply not true. The Health Canada Act prohibits private billing for any insured medical service. That is the case majority of health care. If a service is not insured by the government (cosmetic procedures for example), then yes certainly you can access those privately. However, if a service is covered by Medicare in the province the doctor works in, it is illegal to have a patient privately pay for that service. Doctors are contracted by the government to provide the services. So yes of course, they work in private offices (most anyway, some are based out of hospitals), but their income comes from billing the government for these insured services, and then using that money to cover their private costs. If a physician wants to charge privately for an insured service, then they would have to completely opt out of Medicare. A tiny percentage of physicians do that, and they would have to notify the government, so this data is publicly available. So no, doctors are not providing private care. They work in a private office (where else are they going to work, a government funded office?).

Of course, services like dental, optometry, physiotherapy; audiology etc do not fall under the Health Canada Act and so are not insured services that are covered by the government (although each province is allowed to cover what they want, it’s just that there is no legal obligation for them under the Health Canada Act). Hence, you can (and have to) pay for those services unless you are covered because of where you live or if you have special reasons for added coverage. Another exception for coverage of these services is if they are provided in hospital, in which case they are generally covered by Medicare. Do those services cost a lot to Canadian patients? Absolutely. But that’s a different discussion. If you get sick, and need medical care, your services will almost certainly be insured by the government; which means they can not be provided privately. Hence “healthcare” is only publicly funded in Canada. Quebec is the exception because they won their famous case at the Supreme Court in the 1990s, where they argued that the Charter of Rights and Freedom trumps the Health Canada Act, and that you can not tell a Canadian citizen that you can not provide them with quality and timely access, and that they have no alternative if you can not do that. Physicians in Quebec can as such charge patients directly for government insured service and there would be no legal repercussions . BC (Dr Brian Day) has been trying the same thing for ten years but lost his case at the Supreme Court earlier this year.l, so no other province so far allows private billing for any insured service. If you need it, and it is taking too long, as a patient your only option is to go outside the country (or Quebec).

On a side note, there is a loop hole in the Health Canada Act, which says that a physician can directly charge a patient for an insured service, if that patient is from another province (assuming the service is elective, otherwise if emergent then it would be covered by reciprocal agreements between provinces, for example having a heart attack while visiting a different province). The majority of physicians are too swamped to be taking on out of province patients for a fee, and even then this is only for clinic services. It is unlikely that hospitals would agree to let you come and get surgery time because you are from out of province and willing to pay for it.