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Improving health care without crushing taxpayers
Friday, September 17th, 2010
Sept. 16, 2010
According to the OECD, Canada already devotes more of its GDP to health care than all but five of 32 industrialized nations– the United States, France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany — all of which allow substantial private expenditure on care. Overall, Canada’s health-care spending is 12% above the OECD average. Yet wait times to see physicians and specialists are “endemic,”… and service rationing is widely used by health bureaucrats to control demand and costs… Without more competition and some way, such as user fees, to make patients more responsible for their health choices, the problems will only get worse.
Tags: budget, Health, ideology, mental Health, pharmaceutical
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Let’s not forget gun registry’s origins
Friday, September 17th, 2010
September 17, 2010
“We have 14 dead. They are all women.”… The pain of parents and survivors of Marc Lepine’s murderous rampage brought us the long-gun registry. Has the registry, a creation of the Progressive Conservatives, failed us? Has it cost us billions, without making us more safe? Does the government have a better plan to keep guns out of the hands of madmen? Then by all means, bring it on. But let us have no more small, vindictive slurs aimed not at concern for the vulnerable but motivated by a desire to divide Canada just enough to win a slim majority government.
Tags: crime prevention, rights, women
Posted in Child & Family Debates | 1 Comment »
Canada should consider health-care user fees: OECD
Monday, September 13th, 2010
Provinces administer health care, with a big help from Ottawa through federal transfer payments. But at present, the OECD said the budgets provinces are working with means that “rationing has been necessary, and queues have been endemic, especially as strong concepts of fairness [enshrined in law] prohibit any use of private payment to skip queues or constrain demand.”… “The Canadian system offers high-quality services to all residents, although at relatively high cost,” the OECD said. “Meeting the demographic and fiscal challenges requires bringing down trend growth in public health spending significantly, lest other public spending is squeezed and/or taxes rise.”
Tags: budget, standard of living
Posted in Health Debates | 1 Comment »
Taking on Big Pharma
Saturday, September 11th, 2010
September 10, 2010
The premiers agreed in principle to set up a national agency, similar to one envisaged in Ms. Leslie’s bill, that will bulk buy up to $10-billion in drugs every year, using their combined purchasing power to wring cost concessions from drug companies. Prescription drugs represent the fastest growing item on the health budget and the second-largest category of spending, so the scope for savings are considerable… there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, when it comes to pharmaceuticals, the state needs to become more involved to unleash the full competitive force of the market and save taxpayers billions of dollars.
Tags: budget, ideology, pharmaceutical, tax
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
All-day kindergarten is a waste of money
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
September 8, 2010
… the truth is that the main benefit of a longer kindergarten day is free childcare for working parents. Which is fine, if that is what the government hopes to accomplish. However, they should come clean about what they are doing and why — an act that would allow costs to be cut by hiring qualified caregivers rather than qualified teachers for the added “school time.” An even more efficient way to achieve the free child care would be to simply give parents the equivalent cash, to spent on the childcare arrangement of their choice.
Tags: child care, ideology, participation
Posted in Education Debates | 1 Comment »
Prison reform needed to prevent in-custody deaths: ombudsman
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
Sept. 8, 2010
Ombudsman Howard Sapers… said the Conservative government’s plan to put more people in prison and keep them there longer will only exacerbate ongoing problems in prisons, which are already ill-equipped to ensure the well being of inmates… Among the shortcomings that have been identified: a failure to recognize “suicide pre-indicators” among inmates; holding inmates with mental-health issues in isolation which made their medical problems even worse; and delays in responding to medical emergencies.
Tags: corrections, mental Health
Posted in Child & Family Debates | No Comments »
Liberals will defend universal health care, Ignatieff says
Saturday, September 4th, 2010
Sept. 3, 2010
Prisons and planes are not the priorities of Canadians, Mr. Ignatieff said Wednesday at a news conference in Baddeck, N.S., after the Liberal summer caucus meeting. They are more concerned about child care, post-secondary education for their children, retirement security and their health care, he said… “More health, less health care — I just think that’s crucial,” Mr. Ignatieff said. “You’ve got to pull some demand out.” Health prevention and promotion programs, and improving the health of aboriginal people would be part of that initiative.
Tags: budget, Health
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
Long-form census ‘a public good,’ committee hears
Saturday, August 28th, 2010
Aug. 27, 2010
“Losing the long-form census, from our perspective, is equal to the government turning off Canada’s navigation system,” said Peggy Taillon, president and CEO of the Canadian Council on Social Development… more than 300 organizations have publicly denounced the reforms, saying a voluntary survey will produce skewed results and undermine the statistical backbone of programs, businesses and municipalities across the country…
Tags: ideology, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
Health care poll gets a predictable answer… to the wrong question
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
August 18, 2010
… despite ballooning health care budgets, hospital wait times were 73 per cent longer in 2009 than they were in 1993 – an average of 16.1 weeks. Simply calling on the government to find efficiencies in the current monopoly public-payor system, as the poll implies, will not solve the problem. It is a recipe for delisting services, as Ontario did with optometry, chiropracty and physiotherapy in 2004… the answer is changing the delivery mix from a monopoly public system to a competitive mixed delivery system, such as exists in most of the western world.
Tags: budget, Health, standard of living
Posted in Health Debates | No Comments »
The Employment Insurance crutch
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
August 16, 2010
… it seems the government takes such good care of us that taking care of ourselves has become optional. And if the number of 20-somethings in Toronto on employment insurance is any indication, a shameful number of us are opting out… If the spirit of social assistance is that it prevents the most disadvantaged among us from having to live below a minimum standard, then somewhere along the line, something has gone terribly wrong… young Canadians appear to harbour an alarming sense of entitlement, one the government encourages through an EI system that helps those unwilling to help themselves.
Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
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