PRINCIPLES OF HEALTH CARE IN
CANADA
Summarized by Bill Whitaker from Universal health care: What the
United States
can learn from the Canadian experience
. Pat & Hugh Armstrong with Claudia Fegan, MD.
New York
: The New Press, 1998.
“You can count on Americans to do the right thing, but only after everything else has failed.”(Winston Churchill)
In the United Stateswe have:
- Tried to ignore the issue of the uninsured and underinsured
- Looked for private solutions to the problem
- Begun to pay a price that is immeasurable in terms of care delayed and stagnant workforce with decreased productivity
The Canadians got it right, providing health care for all Canadians through the Canada Health Act.
Five principles: public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability and accessibility.
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Public administration
avoids the profiteering and thus the additional 20-30 percent overhead
and profit associated with for-profit insurance companies. As with US
Medicare the overhead for public health insurance is much less—4-5
percent.
-
Comprehensiveness
means all necessary services are covered. Unless everything is covered,
potential savings are lost if patients delay preventative care or
necessary care as a result of financial concerns.
-
Universality
means everyone is covered. Covering everyone allows allocation of
resources based on need of the community rather than profitability.
This kind of allocation of dollars allows for long range goals and
planning improving the health of a neighborhood, a community, a city, a
state, a nation.
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Portability
means you can take it with you. US citizens stay in unwanted jobs just
to keep their health insurance. Reduced productivity of people who hate
their jobs can stagnate an economy. Canadians are free to follow their
dreams, because coverage is guaranteed.
-
Accessibility means freedom from economic, geographic and bureaucratic barriers to health care.
Canada’s
single-payer, universal, provincially administered health insurance
costs far less that health insurance in the United States, cuts red
tape, reduces costs of administration and yields outcomes substantially
superior to the United States which spends nearly twice as much as
Canada does.