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...

"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...

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...

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.

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...

Since the late 1960s, concerns over the escalating costs of health care have been expressed with increasing vigor on both sides of the Canada-United States border. This is in sharp contrast with the previous 20 years, during which the principal policy concern was to "meet needs" by finding ways...

The purposes of this paper are three: First, we provide an overview of the reinbursement policy situation across the country, emphasizing common elements that have emerged since the earlier article, but also providing a more detailed description of current policy in a subset of provinces....

During the past few years the landscape of Canadian physician reimbursement policy has undergone dramatic changes. Rapidly eroding fiscal environments for provincial (and federal) governments have forced provinces to "get serious" about controlling a significant, previously uncontrolled budget...