[HALIFAX] — Alberta Premier Ralph Klein tabled a copy of AIMS’ recent study on health care in his province’s legislative assembly yesterday, saying that it documents the success of innovative approaches to the provision of publicly-funded medical services.
The report, entitled “Operating in the Dark: The Gathering Crisis in Canada’s Public Health Care System” analyses the challenges that Canada’s medicare system faces in the coming decades. It concludes that those challenges pose a major threat to the quality and affordability of health care available to Canadians in the future. It recommends removing many of the barriers to innovation that now exist within public health care, to allow much more experimentation with competition, public-private partnering, private provision of medical services, information gathering and methods of paying physicians. It also recommends looking to the successful aspects of public medical care systems in other countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and elsewhere.
In tabling the report, this is what the Premier had to say (as reported in the Hansard of the Alberta legislature):
MR. KLEIN: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table copies of the report Operating in the Dark: The Gathering Crisis in Canada’s Public Health Care System by researchers with the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. The report finds ample evidence that private/public partnerships do work to the benefit of the public health system.
“Operating in the Dark,” by Brian Lee Crowley, AIMS President, Dr. David Zitner, Director of Medical Informatics at Dalhousie University and Nancy Faraday-Smith, an AIMS policy analyst, is available free on the Institute’s website at www.aims.ca.
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