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...

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.

While the adjusted clinical group (ACG) system has been extensively validated in the United States, its use in other developed nations has been limited. This article examines the performance of the system in 2 Canadian provinces and accesses the extent to which ACGs can account for some-year and...

Medicare still enjoys broad support, but Canadians have become increasingly concerned that care will not be available for them when they need it. A substantial in Public opinion is a potent catalyst for change. These widespread concerns have already led to large increases in public funding for...

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...