Only Fundamental Change Will Allow Canadians to Preserve What They Value in the Health Care System, New AIMS Study Says The Canadian public health care system is on an unsustainable course, says a new study published today by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a course that will plunge medicare in ever-deepening crises over the next 10 to 20 years. The study s authors Brian Lee Crowley , AIMS president, David Zitner , Director of Medical Informatics at Dalhousie University, and AIMS Policy Analyst Nancy Faraday-Smith argue that medicare s troubles stem from a long list of design flaws and rapidly changing circumstances to which the system is responding poorly, if at all.
Health care is the largest public spending programme in government.
Yet we do not possess the information, or even the ability to gather the information, that would allow us to assess the performance of the current system, let alone evaluate the realistic alternatives. Efforts to overcome the disincentives to vital information gathering within the medicare system have proven ineffective to date. No Canadian jurisdiction is able to provide either systematic, regular and reliable information linking health outcomes with health care activities, or regular and reliable information about access to care. Lack of competition, with its attendant absence of accountability and barriers to patient satisfaction or effective management, is a major cause of the system s failings. Crowley, Zitner and Faraday-Smith are deeply sceptical of medicare s ability to continue to obstruct private sector participation in the provision of many aspects of health care that are currently publicly provided.