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 presents a summary of th 11th Annual Health Policy Conference, November 6, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia.

"Medicare" has two meanings for Canadians: the entire range of health care services, or only those (mainly physicians and hospitals) mandated and governed by the Canada Health Act (CHA). This paper focuses on the narrower legal meaning of Medicare, as does the recent Alberta proposal to fund...

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...

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...

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...

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...