There is No Try: Sustainable Healthcare Requires Reining in Spending Overshoots

Provincial and territorial governments must hit their budget targets better to make publicly funded healthcare fiscally sustainable, warns a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute.

In “There is No Try: Sustainable Healthcare Requires Reining in Spending Overshoots,” William B.P. Robson compares the preliminary and later numbers in National Health Expenditure (NHEX) reports from the Canadian Institute for Health Information from 1998 – 2019. He points out that the gap between the preliminary numbers based on budgets and estimates, and the later numbers based on actual spending, has averaged 0.9 percent annually.