Health Care Reform

[RB]

in ontario i am not sure what percentage are impoverished, of a decent income, and the wealthy - but i bet based on the immigration settlement, there is a high percentage of family that cannot help themselves in terms of privatisation, and your proposal of fee for service for everyone.

the main sufferers would include:

- the old drawing the old age pension

- the children

- the separate single families, where the female is the main provider

- and the identified groups that are at a social disadvantage

so the question is how do you compromise the health care to suit the wealthy whose argument is legitimate - we have toiled, and strive to be somewhere, and now worked very hard for what is ours. now we see each paycheck of ours feeding all those families each month while we now have to struggle to retain what we wish for as lifestyle, and to top it off we are punished severly if we decided to increase that wealth.

but for sure there are no compromises with those blessed taxes, death and debt

[Mike C.]

Nobody in this post has mentioned the fact that the federal libs reduced their agreed portion of healthcare to the provinces from 50% to 14%,in order to show they are capable of producing a balanced budget.I think our next PM was a key figure in this ripoff.This would explain the biggest problem,imo.affecting healthcare.

The second problem,would be, users of the system who have never contributed to it,by way of fraud,or lack of people who actually sponsor new immigants and use the system for free just like all Canadians who have paid into it since it's inception.

The feds need to hold up their and of the bargain,and stop wasting our tax dollars on every special interest group they support to ensure their next undeserved vote.

[Craig Read]

Gov'ts are always late to react to reality.

In Canada private systems of health care are outlawed yet 30% of treatment is private.

Politicians are usually 10 years or more behind the times in the laws they craft. Vested interests and the legal profession always oppose changes to the codified legal system.

Health care can be more efficiently run with competition, with the state being the insurer. This would allow both private and public systems to run. If the public system is better [as Romanow states] people will use it. If not private practices will flourish.

I have said it a million times and will say it again- wage and price controls simply never work.

Socialised health care is no exception.

[Craig Read]

In the US Gov't spends 6.5 % of GDP on Health Care. In Canada it is the same. In the US the private sector spends 7 % of GDP on health care, in Canada it is 3 %.

In neither country is health care organised properly.

There are serious flaws in both models:

1. It is not consumer oriented. Innovation, service and price decreases ONLY occurs in a consumer centric system.

2. In Ont. health will eat up 50 % ! of the budget by 2020. In the US with the new Medicare bill health costs will increase to 20 % of GDP by 2020.

This is unsustainable as is bad or worse, unprofessional help and timely help. for insance 8th Ont hospital with outbreak problem

Look at the SARS fiasco - Communist China and Socialist Toronto are the only areas to suffer - read the SARS inquiry - the system is not built nor managed properly.

3. Lack of resources. In price controlled systems [which the US will have in drugs now], innovation is stifled, costs are not covered and R&D fails. In Canada wage and price controls mean underpaid doctors, nurses and specialists.

Result ? Soviet medicine with shortages, lines and lack of technology.

4. Law. It is too easy to sue and get money. Tort reform is needed for both systems.

Health Care is in need of a reformation. You can have universal access but a myriad amount of avenues of delivery.

Consumer choice is key.

The U.S. economy has boomed because brilliant entrepreneurs can enter it freely. If they succeed, they are appropriately lionized. A McKinsey report claims that the retailing industry was No. 1 in enhancing productivity, and credits Sam Walton's Wal-Mart for much of that increase. No. 2 was the finance sector, whose productivity was greatly enhanced by John Bogle's dogged insistence on the wisdom of indexed, consumer-driven mutual funds. Yet, had Messrs. Bogle and Walton been forced to rely on government approvals to start their businesses and on government-dictated products and prices to earn their revenues, we might not have benefited from the productivity-enhancing innovations they created. Indeed, they would have been chopped off at the knees if they were in the health-care sector: It prohibits physicians, the health-care equivalent of Messrs. Bogle and Walton, from owning their own facilities. The unattractiveness of these conditions explains why few of the 100 Harvard MBA students enrolled in my "Innovating Health Care" course plan to enter the trillion-dollar health-services sector.

Ms. Herzlinger, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of the forthcoming "Consumer-Driven Healthcare," to be published next year by Josey-Bass.