What is capital? capital is commitment. It can take many forms, including bricks and mortar (physical), trained health care personnel (human), and reseach and development activities (intangible). Capital investment decisions in the health care "industry" seem howver to be relatively inflexible...

The simple story of Canadian hospital financing --- single-source (tax-based) public funding through provincial Ministries of Health to individual institutions through prospective global budgets -- offers a relatively accurate general picture which, nevertheless, masks both...

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...

The Canadian and American health care systems differ in three fundamental structure respects: entitlement, management, and environment. Fundamental philosophical differences in the two societies have their outcomes in the different approaches to, and results of , extending entitlement to...

The major objectives of this study were to assess the proportion of patients in acute care hospital beds that meet standard criteria requiring acute care services and to document the alternative type or level of care that would be more appropriate for those patients not meeting the criteria.

This paper attempts to answer the following questions. Why and did North America's first public health insurance scheme develop in Saskatchewan? What were the unique features of Saskatchewan's economy, geography, history which may helped the development of public health insurance in this...

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.