The promise to end “hallway medicine” was an important element in the campaign of Ontario Premier Doug Ford and the Progressive Conservatives in 2018. If they are serious about reaching that goal, the government should change the rules that currently make it almost impossible for privately funded medicine to compete with the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP), even though any move in that direction will provoke cries about the threat of “two-tier medicine.”
The government’s plans for a superagency to replace the Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) and a network of Ontario Health Teams responsible for co-ordinating patient care using digital technology are consistent with the recommendations of Rueben Devlin, the chair of…
Our federal fiscal masters are deeply inconsistent. They freely spend billions in revenue windfalls on one hand, but are obsessive about every nickel of tax they might fail to collect, no matter the cost to Canadians. The 2019 budget features yet another revenue bonanza of scattered handouts, many clearly contrived in haste.
That is bad. What is worse is how the government simultaneously tightens the screws, making tax compliance harder over amounts of money that are often derisory, and citing the integrity of the tax system in resisting reforms that could do Canadians much good.
Start with the big spending. The 2019 budget started from a fiscal baseline that, over the six-year projection period, was better than…
If you were expecting the Liberals to launch a much-anticipated national pharmacare plan as part of its election-year budget, you were likely sorely disappointed. Despite the release of the interim report of the Advisory Council on the Implementation of National Pharmacare earlier this month, and various politicians making various noises about the possibility of such an ambitious proposal, there was almost no new information in the budget about pharmacare, other than new funding that would land years from now. And with important questions left unanswered, provinces and private-insurance companies continue to endure much uncertainty about what the future holds.
Here’s what the budget does provide for: $35 million over 4 years,…
