Provincial health ministers should stop bickering on transfers
KAMLOOPS — The provincial health ministers should resolve in the New Year to stop bickering, take the money from the feds, and use it as intended.
It’s a recurring bad movie says Canadian Medical Association president Granger Avery: “The Groundhog Day-type discussions where political leaders bat around percentages and figures at meetings in hotels have to stop. Our system needs better, and most important, our citizens deserve better (Globe and Mail, Dec.19, 2016).”
The provinces have had thirteen years of increases from the feds at 6 per cent a year to improve health delivery. “The transfers have been growing quite generously,” says Livio Di Matteo, a health-care economist at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. “If you go back to about 2007, if you look at public-health spending, which is largely provincial, it’s grown about 40 per cent. The Canada Health Transfer to the provinces has grown about 70 per cent.”
We need to spend smarter. Canada spends more on health care than Australia, for example, with poorer outcomes as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality.