Douglas believed that health services should be offered to all on an equal basis, so that the poor should be able to use the same services as the rich population, even if they do not have the money to do so. This was the importance of medicare, to bring equality in the care of health services.
Medicare is an important social program because no one is left behind by not being able to pay for medical services. That is, the entire population will receive care in a quality that every human being deserves.
One of the controversies is that the services are not distributed evenly throughout the country. Each province in Canada is responsible for the medicare property, but some provinces do not consider altismo a disease with a right to treatment, for example. So often the program contradicts itself.