Policy Papers

Carl Irvine and Dr. David Gratzer provide a second opinion about the practicality and implications of introducing some form of cost sharing to the Canadian health care system.

Definitely NOT the Romanow Report is AIMS' Sir Antony Fisher Award winning project on Healthcare. This comprehensive proposal for fundamental reform of the Canadian health care system is now being recognized internationally as a public policy benchmark.

Doctors Have to Make a Living Too: The Microeconomcs of Physician Practice delves into the misconceptions about cost drivers in the health care field.

Professor Brian S. Ferguson explores the concept of physician induced demand, one of the fundamental underpinnings of the policy where government limits enrolment in medical schools and artificially limits the number of Canadian physicians.

Julia Witt takes up this challenge by looking at the Oregon approach to health care coverage decision-making, and demonstrates how an improved version of the Oregon model would result in a truer reflection of the collective values of society’s members in deciding what medical services should have first claim on the scarce public health care dollars available.

Author Betty Newson argues argues that Canada’s sustained health care debate has tended to focus primarily on insured Medicare—hospital and medical services and analysis has often overlooked the fragmented funding arrangements in these sectors.

Brian S. Ferguson explores the anti-for-profit bias in the public debate on health reform and concludes that there is, in fact, a considerable amount of evidence to show that there is no systematic differences in efficiency between for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals.

AIMS Senior Fellow Dr. David Zitner argues the government’s ability to play a regulatory role effectively is hampered because, as the ultimate provider of health care services, government is actually being asked to regulate itself – an impossible conflict of interest.