Going Dutch: Choice, Competition and Equity in Healthcare

The Dutch Model: A Cure for What Ails Canadian Healthcare? 

• As progress on modernizing Canadian healthcare delivery remains very slow, and with medical advances and an increasingly aging population, health policymakers should look to the Dutch model, which provides a good example of how managed competition can promote efficiency while preserving the principles of universal insurance and an equitable sharing of the cost, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. 
• The US multi-payer system clearly is not a good example, but there are several other nations who employ a model with more insurance choice and whose healthcare performance is often ranked as equivalent to, or even better than, Canada’s. In this new study, Blomqvist points to the Dutch model to demonstrate that competition can create efficiency while not abandoning universality and equity.
• “We should draw on the example of these pluralistic systems and try to set up a model in which some degree of regulated public-private competition helps move us away from the expensive and unwieldy healthcare system in which we appear to be currently stuck,” explains Blomqvist.