Most Canadians are covered through their emploer-sponsored dental plans.I wonder whether you actually have facts to back that up. Me, I'm self-employed. I've never had coverage of this type (i.e. all the supplementals -- eyeglasses, prescription drugs, dental, long-term disability ...) except for the 10 months I worked for the fed govt many years ago. I did try to buy into the Canadian Bar Association's group plan to get coverage for me plus my employee and her family, but as a sole practitioner with only one employee, I didn't qualify. (I could have bought my own coverage, but not hers; obviously, small outfits like me would have self-selected in or out based on likely costs -- had I had an employee whose spouse had coverage, I would not have subscribed -- and so the costs of accepting such members into the group would have been skewed.)
An increasing number of people are self-employed in often precarious work, and insurance coverage of this nature is expensive.
Ah, here we go:
http://www11.sdc.gc.ca/en/cs/sp/arb/publications/research/1998-000168/page04.shtmlThe bivariate and multivariate analysis that follow are based on the 1995 Survey of Work Arrangements (SWA), an addendum to the November 1995 Labour Force Survey.3 In total there were 25,721 respondents to the SWA.4 Of these, 21,261 were paid workers in their main job and the remaining 4,460 were self-employed. The self-employed are not included in this analysis since the questions regarding employer sponsored health and dental plan coverage do not pertain to their situation. Full-time students ... were excluded from the analysis (this eliminated 1,428 records, or 6.7 percent of sample, from the data set).
Obviously, the retired, the unemployed and social assistance recipients were also not included.
Overall, the SWA shows 63 percent of Canadian non-student employees are entitled to an extended health plan (59 percent to a dental plan) through their employer. Gender differences in coverage rates are apparent with 69 (59) percent of males having an extended health (dental) plan compared with 58 (54) percent of females.
... Here, the bivariate results show that 69 (64) percent of full-timers have extended health (dental) coverage compared with just 26 (23) percent of part-timers.11 Furthermore, permanent workers are roughly three times as likely to have extended health (dental) coverage as non-permanent workers.
... The sectors with the lowest percentage of workers with health (dental) coverage are agriculture, business, personal and miscellaneous services, wholesale and retail trade and construction, while utilities, communications, finance, insurance and real estate (often federally regulated sectors) and public administration have the highest extended health (dental) coverage rates.14 The low coverage rates in the above industries are a concern as more than one in three workers in Canada are employed in these industries. Furthermore, since service and trade are rapidly growing sectors of the economy, the share of paid workers in these industries, along with the percentage of workers without extended health and dental coverage, is likely to increase.
... The data from Table 1 show that younger workers (under 25 years) are roughly two times less likely than older workers (25 years and over) to have extended health or dental coverage.15 When examining the effect of family status on extended health (dental) coverage, married workers with children are more likely to have extended health (dental) coverage than those without children. This reverses for single people, with single parents roughly half as likely as other singles to have health (dental) coverage.
So ... I don't think that 63% of a population that excludes the self-employed, full-time students, the unemployed, the retired and social assistance recipients (who are perhaps more likely to have children than the "employee" category?) really constitutes "most Canadians". And when the people least likely to be covered are those most likely to need coverage -- part-time workers, single parents (women), people in lower-wage occupations -- the relevance of the number of people covered has to be qualified by the fact that those without coverage are more likely to be those most in need of it.
But back to our sheep. "This" may well be about "prioritizing" -- but the entirely separate issue is
whether we will have the power to prioritize public dental care if we choose to do it.
One's individual opinion about the priority that should be assigned to such a plan is one thing. The collective ability to implement a collective decision to assign it priority, if such a decision is made, is another.
It is certainly arguable that if public dental care is collectively decided not to be a priority, there is no harm done if the ability to implement such a plan is bargained away as part of a free trade deal. It's arguable -- but it's not some sort of universal truth. Someone who, or some society which, regards a public dental care plan as a non-priority at the present time might still consider it to be a good idea, and might well wish to have the option to implement one in future if it becomes possible to prioritize it.
Dental care might not be a priority, and expenses may not be catastrophic, for the average person (although the three grand I spent on a disastrous dental chain of events a couple of years ago was no picnic even for me). But dental care for children, including preventive care, is actually quite important. And the cost of such care can be difficult for many low-income working families, and certainly for families receiving social assistance, which does not provide adequate coverage for this care.
Perhaps unlike you, I do think that dental care for children, at least, is a priority at least equal to some other things that we collectively spend money on. So I, at least, would prefer to have the option of implementing such a plan in future.