Memoir: early years of Hospital insurance in British Columbia.

Abstract

Hospital insurance is so taken for granted in Canada that little or no notice was taken of its fortieth anniversary in 1987. British Columbians should be particularly interested because hospital insurance was a field in which this province was a pioneer. When the British Columbia Hospital Insurance Service (BCHIS) was established in 1949, ^ w a s o n ty ^ i e second such scheme in Canada. The Saskatchewan precedent, however, was not very useful because British Columbia had a more varied economy and a more transient population but lacked a well-developed municipal system. In addition, the lack of hospital beds, rising costs, rumours of widespread evasion of premium payments, delays in processing paper work, and an unpopular co-insurance scheme made the BCHIS an easy target for the press, for the opposition, and for dissatisfied members of the Coalition government. As Malcolm Taylor has observed in his study of the Canadian Health Insurance system, the BCHIS under a new minister and commissioner began to improve its situation in 1950. The public, however, remembered the startup problems and made plans to express its discontent at the next provincial election. Indeed, some historians have suggested that hospital insurance was "the most bitterly emotional and controversial issue in the 1952 election campaign." Such observations, as this memoir implies, probably underestimate the complexities of the British Columbia political scene. Although the writing of political memoirs sometimes seems to be a minor national industry, few British Columbia politicians have written reflectively on their experiences. One exception is A. Douglas Turnbull, who assumed responsibility for the problems of the BCHIS on his appointment as Minister of Health and Welfare in May 1950. His recollections offer a valuable insight into the effort to overcome the problem of administering a pioneering programme of social legislation and into the fractiousness of caucus and