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...

In this paper we outline a formal and comprehensive analytic framework in which income transfers - the principal effects of user charges - can be traced between groups in the population, between payers and health care providers, and among providers.

This paper was commissioned by the Canadian Health Service Reseah Foundation, the CanadianInstitute for Health Information and the Fedaral/Provincil/Territorial Advisory Committee on Health Services, as background information for a national workshop to develop measurement indicators for...

In this paper we examine why user charges exist for some health care services and not for others.

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...

Illness increases with age. All else being equal, an older population has greater needs for health care. This logic has led to dire protections of skyrocketing costs - apocalyptic demography. Yet numerous studies have shown tha aging effects are relatively small, and all else is not equal. Cost...

The Canadian health care system took its modern form between 1968 and 1971, and its fundamental principles and basic structure features of organization and finance have remained the same since then.

This paper has attempted to identify characteristic patterns of performance in tax-financed (TF) systems, contrasting them with systems relying more heavily on other revenue sources.

Over the past decade, the 'pharmacoeconomics' phenomenon has incited a stream of commentaries about the economic evaluation of drugs, conflicts of interest and ways of retaining respectability for this component of health economics profession. Private coporations now finance so many aspects of...