Minutes after giving birth, blood from the umbilical cord is collected and sent off to a central cord blood bank to be cryogenically frozen. Years later this cord blood could be used to cure some cancers and treat rare diseases. While to some this sounds like the stuff of science fiction, the use of cord …
Like many Ontarians, I have been moved by the request of Kimm Fletcher to have the Ontario government pay for the drug Avastin to treat her recurrent brain cancer. Ms. Fletcher is 41 years old and the mother of two young children. It sounds like her brain cancer is growing aggressively despite the best treatments …
Health spending in Canada grew by only 2.6% this year, according to the Canada Institute for Health Information (CIHI). That’s a far cry from the 7% annual spending increases between 2000 and 2010. This is the fifth straight decline in the growth rate and the third year that per capita health spending has dropped in …
There is little doubt that system transformation is necessary to achieve sustainable and high-quality health care for Canadians. In recent years, the care and management of high users (HU) of health care has emerged as a focal point for developing a sustainable health care system. Despite the focus on this group, one question has received …
One of the priorities of the Ontario government is to develop strategies to reduce the disproportionate amount of health system use, and in particular of acute hospital care, by small sub-groups of people, such as seniors, those with complex chronic health issues or people whose health is complicated by mental health or substance use issues. …
At a national health policy conference recently, Ontario’s Health Minister Deb Matthews made a few notable comments. Among them was a request that policy experts applaud government officials when they do the right thing. Too often, good healthcare policy gets blocked by a very vocal minority of stakeholders. Minister Matthews also said that expanding prescription …
During her campaign for reelection in 2012, Alberta premier Alison Redford promised to create 140 Family Care Clinics (FCCs) over three years. She articulated a vision of primary care that would be one-stop, with many different health care providers under one roof. These clinics would have expanded hours to improve patient access, and would focus …
Most people are probably aware of Fair PharmaCare, British Columbia’s universal public plan that covers everyone for catastrophic drug costs (other provinces have similar programs, such as Trillium in Ontario). BC’s program pays for nearly a billion dollars of prescription drugs every year. Our provincial government also directly and indirectly pays for a lot of …
Last month, after the publication of an open letter by a large group of health professional organizations and health care advocates, former Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq re-opened consultation on the contentious issue of whether Health Canada should approve clinics where people can sell their plasma to a for-profit corporation. Canadian Doctors for Medicare – the …
“Pay-at-risk” became a political flash point in Alberta last month when Health Minister Fred Horne fired the Alberta Health Services board when it didn’t agree to withhold the at-risk part of the compensation package for about 100 executives. Alberta Health Services (AHS) had introduced pay-at-risk for health care executives in 2009. With pay-at-risk — also …
My partner Bill and I have a soft spot for animals. It is one of the most important values I have learned from Bill. Traveling to London from our farm we happened on a kitten sitting in the middle of the road. She was sick, blind, desperately thin, and only two or three weeks old …
As a former member of the Alberta Health Services Board who had my own disagreement with the previous Minister of Health, the news about the recent dismissal of the entire AHS Board over a dispute about pay-at-risk for senior executives had emotional resonance. Some of those who were fired are my friends and have served …
Each weekday, staff at the Exceptional Access Program (EAP) of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care receive between 250 and 300 requests for special prescription medications. These prescription drugs—typically expensive medications that are felt to be cost effective only when used to treat selected patients with specific problems—are not on the province’s regular …
Want to buy a $100 coffee? Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? However, it’s equally absurd that this is how much more Albertans pay for some generic drugs than people in other countries. Take, for instance, 20mg of the cholesterol-lowering drug simvastatin. Albertans pay 90 cents for each tablet. In New Zealand, the government drug plan buys the …
Is the formula for Canada’s success to be wealthy, healthy and wise or to be healthy, wealthy and wise? The difference may appear subtle, but it gets to the heart of a question that has serious implications for the future of publicly funded health care: have we Canadians been missing out on the opportunity to …
After a decade of focusing on access to health care services, the Ontario government appears to be turning its attention to improving the quality and costs of these services. At the moment, there is considerable variation in how health care is delivered in Ontario’s hospitals, so patients with the same diseases are receiving different qualtiy …
Ontario’s Health Links initiative is a “big manoeuvre” in a complex provincial system, acknowledges Helen Angus, associate deputy minister with the transformation secretariat of the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (MOHLTC). The initiative aims to facilitate coordination of care at a local level for high needs patients. It comes in the wake of …
Connie’s story Connie is a Personal Support Worker (PSW) who cares for seniors and people with dementia in their homes. She is a graduate of George Brown College’s PSW program and has been working in home care for the last 10 years. She makes $16 per hour, but rarely gets paid for more than four …
In my last blog post, I argued that to overcome the insurance market failures in health care the government must either provide universal public health insurance or tightly regulate the private insurance market. Here I explain why a single-payer universal system won’t bankrupt the health care system. Indeed, it will do the opposite. Reducing administrative …