Commentaries, Private For-Profit Solutions to Funding & Delivery
BC doctors’ election represents crossroads for the future of medicine in CanadaNormally provincial medical association elections are not national news. The one vote difference between first and second place in the race for president of the Doctors of BC – later declared a tie after a recount – might be enough to grab people’s attention.
Four things you should know about the pending Charter challenge against medicareA long-running dispute between Dr. Brian Day, the co-owner of Cambie Surgeries Corporation and the British Columbia government may finally be resolved in the BC Supreme Court this year — and the ruling could transform the Canadian health system from coast to coast.
How to create an affordable prescription drug planThe Liberal government of New Brunswick appears to be stepping back from the brink of mandatory prescription drug insurance. And so they should.
Private delivery of healthcare can work in a publicly funded system but comes with risksA decision by the Alberta Health Services last month seemed innocuous enough — to swap the tender for laboratory services from a United States-based transnational corporation to an Australian one — but it provoked a furore of discontent.
Why Canadian medicare should neither ‘go Dutch’ or ‘to the dogs’First was Sarah Boston’s new book, Lucky Dog, in which she details her personal experience with thyroid cancer and navigating the Canadian health system. Boston, a veterinary oncologist, claims that Canadian dogs often have better access to health care than their human counterparts.
Cash for blood products a flawed policyIn the early 1980s, over 2000 Canadians who received blood transfusions were infected with HIV and as many as 30,000 contracted Hepatitis C. This tragic scandal, and the Krever inquiry that followed, resulted in the overhaul of our blood donation system to ensure the safety of any blood products. This made Canada one of the safest countries for blood transfusion in the world.
Let’s not have Groundhog Day in Alberta’s public health careIs it Groundhog Day in Alberta? We Albertans seem doomed to wake every day to the same thorny and emotional debate: public health care vs. private health care. It’s a mug’s game but we appear as inexorably caught in it as the weatherman in the movie Groundhog Day, who realizes he is hopelessly condemned to spend the rest of his life in the same place, seeing the same people do the same thing day after day after day.
Genetic privacy regulations may have unintended consequencesOntario is proposing a change to the Ontario Human Rights Code aimed at protecting people’s genetic information from being used by insurance companies and employers. This would allow more people to have genetic testing done, for health or research purposes — testing they would possibly not do if they had to disclose the test results to insurers.
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By Allan Maslove