Op-Eds
Published in the Globe and Mail on April 26, 2012
By Gerard Boychuk
Having won the Alberta election, Premier Alison Redford is now setting her sights on providing leadership in establishing the national agenda on health-care reform. In doing so, she won’t be able to ignore the issue of patient wait times. Wildrose may have lost the election, but it did propose some ideas in this regard that are likely to remain front and centre on the political agenda.
An important one that will have life in Alberta and beyond is a Patient Wait Time Guarantee, which would have allowed Albertans on lengthy waiting lists to seek care from independent health providers in or out of province with provincial public insurance coverage.…
Published in the Toronto Sun on April 5, 2012
By Colin Busby
The Ontario government recently announced plans to radically change the way it pays hospitals. The plan is to gradually move from a system of lump-sum budgets to a system that pays hospitals according to patient needs.
Change is overdue: Most advanced countries have already developed consumer-driven payment models for more timely patient care. But Ontario’s hospital payment plan must get the incentives right to encourage innovation, maintain quality and curb the growth in health costs.
Hospitals were paid roughly $17.6 billion, or 36% of the overall public health budget, by the province of Ontario in 2011. That’s by far the largest slice of the…
Published in the Ottawa Citizen on April 22, 2011
By David Dodge and Richard Dion
As societies become richer, they tend to accommodate the rising demands and expectations of their citizens for more and better-quality health-care services. The value that citizens place on preserving and extending a good-quality life becomes more important as their consumption of other goods and services expands with their income.
Over the last 35 years or so, public and private health-care expenditures have risen substantially as a proportion of national income (GDP), doubling to 16 per cent in the United States and increasing from seven to 12 per cent in Canada. This is a trend that will not dissipate easily.
On the basis of…
Published in the National Post on March 22, 2011
By Colin Busby
Do you have a sharp pain in your stomach that won't go away? If yes, you may soon visit an emergency room for help. Your next decision is whether to go to Toronto General, Western, St. Michael's, etc., for service. As an aid, the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care posts online monthly updates of average ER wait times for complex (strokes, chest pains, etc.) and non-complex (sprains, cuts, etc.) patients at each hospital.
For starters, we should applaud this initiative: transparency is the first step to bringing wait times down to provincial standards. Plus, a corresponding pay-for-results initiative encourages improved hospital performance…
Published in the National Post on March 7, 2011
By Colin Busby
In 1984, the federal Parliament unanimously passed the Canada Health Act (CHA). Ottawa enshrined the principles of public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability and accessibility as the cornerstones of Canada’s public health system, and made federal health-care funding conditional on the provinces’ adherence to these principles.
Today, the CHA is showing its age. The laws that best suited Canadian health care in the 1980s no longer meet the challenges of 2011; the size of the system, its cost and its complexity have grown. Revisiting the principles of the CHA, and their effectiveness in improving health-care delivery over…
