Principles to Guide a Unified Funding Model for Non-Medicare (non-insured) Health and Social Services
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.
How Should We Decide What to Cover Under Medicare?
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.
Issues in the Demand for Medical Care
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.
Doctors Have to Make a Living Too
Doctors Have to Make a Living Too: The Microeconomcs of Physician Practice delves into the misconceptions about cost drivers in the health care field.
Profits and Insurance: AIMS releases first two health care reform backgrounder papers
Profits and the Hospital Sector and Canadian Health Care Insurance
Profits and the Hospital Sector
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.
What makes Canada great isn’t what you think
Canada has its flaws, and from within it can often seem that our governments are too insulated and unaccountable. But that’s not how others, less lucky than we are, see it. At this year’s Diplomatic Forum (An event organized each year by the Department of Foreign Affairs to bring together the majority of ambassadors posted to Ottawa and take them to a provincial capital outside central Canada.) ambassador after ambassador stood up to express their admiration for Canadian governmental accountability. What sparked these accolades was a debate between Stephane Dion, federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister, and two local commentators, historian Brian Cuthbertson and AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley. In his regular column Crowley remarks on the two things about this session that struck the ambassadors forcefully. The first was that, in the vast majority of the world, ministers cannot be called to account for what they do with power.
St. Anthony, The Town That Roared
When the crab fishery resumes next April, the Northern Peninsula town of St. Anthony plans to impose a tariff on shellfish landed in their harbour and shipped out to other Newfoundland centres. It is the latest in a series of attempts by the province to shield workers from having to compete with the rest of the world on a level playing field. While individual provinces have tried to bar workers and other companies from competing in their internal market, we now have a town attempting to secure work for its citizens by levying a tariff on fish that is shipped out of town. Peter Fenwick, AIMS’ voice on Newfoundland and Labrador, explains in this commentary why, in the end, this protectionist approach impoverishes the entire rural sector of the province and prevents capital formation that could be used to expand the economic base of rural Newfoundland.
The Kyoto Accord and Newfoundland – AIMS on St. Johns’ radio
In this radio commentary, Peter Fenwick, AIMS voice on Newfoundland and Labrador, looks at the potential impacts of the Kyoto accord for Newfoundland. Take a look at the full commentary to see why Fenwick believes Newfoundlanders will see “…a dollar a litre for gas, twenty cents more for home heating oil…a marked drop in offshore oil exploration, and a dismal decline in our rate of growth.” Publication: November 1 2002
In Canadian Health Care Insurance
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.