LA GRANDE — The debate over implementing a single-payer health care system in the United States may have fizzled out with the nomination of now President-elect Joe Biden, but that hasn’t stopped one group from pushing for such a system in Oregon.

Health Care for All Oregon, a statewide advocacy network with some 130 members, wants to bring that single-payer system to the Beaver State, and the group’s Union County chapter has been doing its part to help in that fight.

HCAO’s Union County chapter held a Zoom meeting Tuesday, Dec. 15, with guest speaker Francine Brazeau, a Canada native who worked in the U.S. health care system before returning north. The meeting focused on the differences between U.S. and Canadian health care, the latter of which is a single-payer system.

“It’s been pretty amazing to see the (Canadian) system at work,” Brazeau said.

Brazeau said while health care procedures in the U.S. were advanced and high quality, they were far more difficult to access compared to Canada, where the medicine is just as advanced.

Meeting-goers questioned Brazeau on how the Canadian system functioned — how it was funded, what problems it had, its effects on different parts of the population — to understand how such a system in Oregon might work.

Brazeau noted Canada’s health care is funded nationally but administered provincially and population-dense parts of the country tended to pay disproportionately more than those in rural areas. She also said many of the common criticisms of single-payer health care in the U.S. didn’t materialize in Canada’s system.

“The atrocious wait times? I’m not seeing them,” Brazeau said. “One of my friends in Toronto, he’s about 76 years old, he got a hip replacement last June and he was on the waiting list. He only waited three weeks for the hip replacement. The myth that there are people dying waiting is just, I’ve never seen anything like it. If you need a medical procedure done, you will get it.”

The wait times, Brazeau said, were reasonable in her experience caring for her elderly father as well. She said Canadian health care allows its users to choose their provider and a doctor being “out-of-network” was a foreign concept.

HCAO’s efforts to implement a single-payer system in Oregon center around the formation of a legislative task force due to the passage of Senate Bill 770 last year. The task force is charged with recommending a plan for universal health care in Oregon to the Legislature, and a member of the task force attended Union County HCAO’s meeting with Brazeau.

Cliff Bentz, who represented Union County in the Senate at the time, and Greg Barretto, who continues to serve in the House, both voted against SB 770.

Health Care for All Oregon remains far from realizing its goal, and Union County’s chapter faces a steep uphill battle in selling any such universal health care plan in the rural, conservative-leaning locale. Nonetheless, the small but determined group will surely continue to advocate for health care as a right to all Oregonians.

For more information on HCAO’s Union County chapter, visit unioncountyhealth.org.