Ford’s expansion is not private care. It is a shift back to Medicare’s founding principles. Premier Ford has started to slice apart payment for care and management of medicine. He aims to disentangle political risk and service delivery.
This week’s Hub Dialogue Roundtable discusses Canada’s decision to send 200 armoured vehicles to Ukraine and whether this represents an escalation, as well as the health care news that emerged out of Ontario this week.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he hopes private clinics will bring the province’s surgical backlog to normal levels in a matter of months and promised on Monday that the expanded capacity at for-profit clinics is here to stay.
As Ontario reached the two-year mark of the pandemic earlier this year, it secured another grim milestone: the province’s surgical backlog had pushed past a million procedures.
The Canada Health Act transformed medicare. But 38 years on, it’s failing us. A new document to replace the Canada Health Act could be introduced to meet the demands of the 21st century.
Study after study shows that Canada’s health-care system is being outperformed by other OECD countries that also provide universal coverage.
An estimated quarter of Greater Victoria’s nearly 400,000 residents did not have a family doctor in February. In April, the wait times to see a doctor at a walk-in were the highest in Canada, at 161 minutes.
Canada’s health-care system that appears to be in meltdown. How the provinces solve this problem, if they solve it, could set the course for Canadian health care for decades to come.
There is nothing preventing the federal government from coming up with its own indicators based on available provincial data and creating a new grant that would complement the existing Canada Health Transfer, which would remain operating as it has.
The experience of the pandemic has required some updating to libertarian priors about how much people are willing to sacrifice to help each other. But that doesn’t mean we need to abandon libertarian principles altogether.
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