From Yahoo Health. Now they admit it!
"Canada's public healthcare system is becoming too expensive but could offer better value without drastic cuts or abandoning its state-funded structure, one of the country's most influential economists said on Thursday.
Changes needed include more treatment of patients outside of hospitals -- through family doctors and home care, for example -- and by offering more private services paid for by the public purse, said Don Drummond, a former Toronto-Dominion Bank chief economist and federal finance official.
Drummond, who has been hired by the Ontario government to advise it on program spending, said in a report that politically "palatable" options are needed to tackle the threat of ballooning health care costs.
"If healthcare spending keeps the provinces' backs to the fiscal cliff, they might once again lash out with spending cuts, as they did in the 1990s," Drummond warned in the report for the market-friendly C.D. Howe Institute, a public-policy think tank.
"But a lesson should be learned from that episode: little was really solved ... the experience left the public even more leery of moves to save money or raise efficiency."
Healthcare in Canada is delivered through a publicly funded system that covers all "medically necessary" hospital and physician care, as well as prescription drugs for seniors, and curbs the role of private medicine.
While the system has widespread public and political support, costs have soared well above the rate of inflation and are expected to climb further as the baby-boom generation ages.
Drummond said other ways to save money include allowing nurses and physicians' assistants to perform some tasks done by doctors and enabling pharmacists to write basic prescriptions.
Policymakers should also contain drug costs and change the way doctors are paid, with more emphasis on salaries and less on fees for services. He also urged lower fees for procedures where technological advances have made them quicker, such as cataract surgery.
But doctors should receive incentives when they find ways to improve the quality of care, such as lowering the number of complications after treatment, he said.
Drummond noted that Canadians spent C$192 billion ($186 billion) on healthcare in 2010, or 11.7 percent of gross domestic product. In Ontario, Canada's most populous province, the health-spending share of GDP was even higher at 12.2 percent.
Of the 34 countries covered in the latest OECD health data, Canada had the 7th most expensive system. The United States topped the list at 16 percent of GDP."
Sometimes we get what we pay for. Sometimes they get what we pay for too, when they fly into Seattle, Detroit, or new York to see one of our doctors.
Like us, maybe they would get more for their buck by AVOIDING certain things...I'm just sayin'. But I guess their happiness quotient is more important than their individual liberty.
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The reality is that the Canadian public healthcare system is becoming too expensive for the working class to fund.
Only relatively wealthy Canadians or those funded by donations can afford to travel to the US for medical treatments including those not available here. Basic medical premiums for a family of four above the offically non-existant poverty level are roughly $140/month and covers doctor's office and hospital visits, surgery, xrays and blood tests as well as medications given while in hospital. It also includes partial payment for things like chiropractic and massage therapy, but with an annual limit and only if your income level is low enough. Premiums are reduced at varying income levels, but do not increase at any income level.
Once your income is derived entirely from the public purse, all health care, including full dental and vision care (that is not available to those who pay basic health care premiums) is covered for you. That includes visits to enough doctors to find one who will "certify" that you are unfit for gainful employment.
We haven't used the system much since our (now grown) children's birth, so I think our premiums have come pretty close to repaying what we have used in coverage. And I'm good with that. By the same token, we can't afford the dental work I need to have done right now. We have been able to pay for the vision care we have needed, but not with exams on the recommended schedule. Exams and new lenses for one are more than the grocery budget, new frames boost it to a mortgage payment. A dental cleaning is almost a month's groceries. For the most part, we have lost faith in mainstream medicine as a form of healthcare. We've done better without it. I think we should have started on that road much earlier and would have prevented most of the few problems we deal with now.
Things will certainly get worse, because Canadians are not far behind Americans in obesity rates and all the associated illnesses. Before that trend emerged, the system worked well and was affordable. Today, the Senate is voting on whether or not pizza is a vegetable. It looks like a bunch of turnips will decide that it is. When people cooked and mashed turnips just before they ate them, we didn't have this problem. Now we eat s**t that didn't exist a few decades ago and let turnips make decisions.
So once again, the "poor" get it all, and we get stuck with bad produce! :)
Our premiums are about 3X what a Canadian family would pay, and we're in the "self+1" category--not even a family. We're also in the highest deductible range.
When Obamacare comes in 2014, it will be both a blessing and a curse: the premiums/penalty will be half, but so will the amount and quality of care. Here, our premiums come out before tax, meaning they act as a tax shelter. Obamacare would open up more of our income to taxation--that is what it's REALLY all about! This was a long and windy road to increased taxes with a healthcare access disguise.
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