Elizabeth May’s Health Care Solutions

Craig Cantin — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:36:39 +0000

Improve the bed to bureaucrat ratio (more beds; fewer bureaucrats). Special effort should be made to expand availability of lower cost long-term care and recuperation beds, leaving high-cost post-op beds available for people who really need them;
Create a national pharmacare programme with bulk buying of drugs at the federal level to provide at lower cost to provinces. Support the University of British Columbia Therapeutics Initiative and expand its approach to ensuring drugs are only registered if they do more good than harm, across Canada;
Focus on efficient use of resources. Not every patient needs every diagnostic test. This bioethics discussion has been growing in the medical literature. Avoiding waste is a sensible approach, but can be difficult to implement. (“From an Ethics of Rationing to an Ethics of Waste Avoidance,” New England Journal of Medicine, May 24, 2012);
Provide student loan forgiveness incentives for graduating doctors, nurses, paramedics and other health care professionals who agree to staff rural facilities and family practice clinics where recruitment is currently a problem;
Enshrine a policy that seniors’ care must be provided in the communities where they or their families live;
Expand home support and home care programs and assisted-living services to support people with chronic care needs, including many seniors who wish to stay in their own homes and communities; and
Ensure that the Canada Health Act is enforced. (i.e., the federal government cannot wash its hands of health care.)

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What is the Role of the Federal Government?

Craig Cantin — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 12:31:39 +0000

Under the Canada Health Act (CHA), the federal government is in the driver’s seat to ensure all the Act’s principles are respected. The federal Minister of Health should refuse to grant funding for any province that ignores its principles. The five criteria guiding the provincial public health insurance plans, which should be non-negotiable, are:

Public Administration: The public health insurance plan must be managed in a public, not-for-profit fashion.
Comprehensiveness: All residents must be covered for “medically necessary” health services.
Universality: All residents must be covered by the public insurance plan on uniform terms and conditions.
Portability: All residents must be covered by their public plan, wherever they are treated in Canada.
Accessibility: All residents must have access to insured health care services on uniform terms and conditions without financial charges, or discrimination based on age, health status or financial circumstances.

If the federal government walks away from enforcing these standards, some provinces may choose to privatize parts of the health care system, while others will offer a lower standard of care than their wealthier neighbours. This is almost inevitable if the provinces with booming economies receive more in health care transfers than their poorer cousins.

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Canada Health Act Archives | Elizabeth May

Elizabeth May’s Health Care Solutions

What is the Role of the Federal Government?