Our system of universal public insurance for health care is by a considerable margin Canada's must successful and popular public program. We think of it, not just as an administrative mechanism for paying medical bills, but as an important symbol of community, a concrete representation of mutual...

Age is less important than proximity to death as a predictor of costs. However, the pattern of social and nursing care costs is different from that for acute medical care. In planning services it is important to take into account the relatively larger impact of aging on social and nursing care...

In order to develop standardized measures to access patients's relative priority for services for which there are waiting lists, it is essential that key terms be clearly defined. We propose that severity be defined as the degree or extent of suffering, limits to activities or risk of death,...

The Canadian debate about access to care, and waiting lists in particular, is characterized by disturbing chasms between widely held views and research evidence. This disjunction apprears to be the product of a number of factors, including lack of standars approaches to measurement and reporting...

In order to develop standardized measures to access patients's relative priority for services for which there are waiting lists, it is essential that key terms be clearly defined. We propose that severity be defined as the degree or extent of suffering, limits to activities or risk of death,...

There is a growing concer over the supply of physicians to meet current and future Canadian requirements.Increased outflow id distributed to the retirement of the baby-boom generation and the ongoing migration of Canadian physicians to the United States, Inflow comes through a variaty of routes...

Overall changes in health care use were small, which suggests that the repercussions of the decline in acute care services for elderly people have been minimal. The higher age-adjusted death rates in the later cohort in full-time care suggests that long-term stays are becoming reserved for...

A "waiting list" for health care is a list of patients awaiting a service such as surgery or an appointment with a cardiologist. But this doesn't tell us whether everyone who waits for a service is actually on a list, or how patients get on lists, or whether they all need to be there, or who...

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...