Front-line health executives, physicians and other professions, and patients will have a different view. Private physician, chronic and other health-care services are expanding, but at a much reduced rate. With shifts in demand from the public system likely, this also implies a strain on private capacity as is indicated by lengthening waiting times. Approximately one-fifth of the costs of health services are supplied by industries other than those managed as health services. Overall, these inputs are being reduced.
Cost cutting goes beyond restraints on the use of real resources.
Including unincorporated income, compensation in the private physician and other health-care delivery industry now ranks ninth among the approximately 130 private and public industries we monitor, having fallen from second position at the start of the 1980s. A comparatively slow growth of pharmaceutical prices in recent years reflects tightening budgets of both provincial and private formularies, and indicates that cost cutting is also reflected in prices offered by suppliers to the health system. Of perhaps more importance to the future are the emerging changes to the structure of health-care delivery. The changes to structures and rules affecting health policy and other decision making will have an uncertain impact on transparency, an important feature of social financing systems. Financing arrangements are also being changed.