Healthcare

According to a Dalhousie study Nova Scotia's health indicators are worse than those of many other provinces. That, says Dr. Hamm, means Nova Scotia should get more - up to 15 per cent more - in health-care funding from Ottawa to close the "health gap" with the rest of the country. Yet the real disease is poor management of the health-care dollars we're already spending, a fact that comes through clearly when you compare the provinces' health-care performance more carefully than the premier has done.

In an op-ed piece that originally appeared in the National Post, Dr. David Zitner of Dalhousie University and AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley argue that our health care problems stem chiefly from lack of information, not money. Publication: NP, April 3, 2000.

Is it right to say that Premier Ralph Klein's proposals to allow overnight stays in private medical clinics in Alberta constitutes a fundamental challenge to medicare? AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley argues that, on the contrary, it is no more than a timid extension of some already widely-accepted principles of this country's health care system. Publication: CHH & TJSJ & SJT, March 15, 2000.

Our myopic fear of Americanizing our health care system blinds us to the many constructive reforms to publicly-financed health care that Europeans have introduced in recent years in response to the same sort of challenges our home grown medicare faces. Publication: CHH December 26, 1999; SJT, January 9, 2000. By Nancy Faraday-Smith