Our system of Universal public insurance for health care is by a considerable magin Canada's most successful and popular puiblic program. Our system works, and compared to most other systems works well, while the American alternative does not.

Control of health care costs is often portrayed as a struggle between external, "natural" forces pushing costs up and individuals, groups, and societies trying to resists the inevitable.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) creates new challenges for the Canadian Healthcare system arguably one of the most "socialized" systems in the world today. In particular, the WTO's enhanced trade dispute resolution powers, enforceable with sanctions, may make Canadian healthcare vulnerable to...

While concerns over escalation in health care costs are virtually universal in the industrialized world, the forms of policy response, and their relative success, have been quite variable.

An Abyss divided common understandings about waiting lists from evidence about their nature and causes and what might work to rationalize them. In a recent comprehensive report for Health Canada we found that the state of waiting-list information and management systems in Canada is Woefully...

Canadians are justifiably proud of Medicare. All (but one) of the major industrialized countries have established universal public payment systems for health care, and most are similarly proud, or at least highly supportive, of them. National systems differ in important details but in broad...

In this paper we review and extend an earlier, in-depth analysis of the effects of users ccharges. The present paper assesses whether experience and published literature in the years since 1979 alter any of the (largely negative) conclusions of the earlier study concerning the ability of direct...

The year 1981 appears, in retrospect, to have been something of a turning point in the evolution of the Canadian health care system. It was not obvious at the time -- the year did not, 1961 or 1971, mark the completion of a clearly defined stage of public coverage or, like 1978, a major shift in...

In this paper we examine some of the most frequently heard arguments for user charges and look at what evidence there is for claims and counter-claims that are often made.