Extending Canadian Health Insurance


Book Description

This study explores the policy options a provincial government might consider in extending health care coverage to the purchase of prescription drugs and dental care. It examines the major public policy objectives involved, such as spreading risk, redistributing wealth, and reducing the barriers to care, and evaluates alternative programs in terms of their costs and efficiency as well as their realization of the basic social objectives of health care. Using varied statistics, some drawn from schemes in other provinces, it estimates what different packages of pharmacare and denticare would have cost in Ontario in 1975. The results indicate that universal coverage may be one of the most costly and least effective options. Based on current modes of service delivery, a universal pharmacare and denticare program would transfer wealth to upper income groups without significantly improving the utilization of health care services. A study of drug manufacturing and retailing systems in Canada and of the structure of dental services suggests that wasteful methods of service delivery could lower per capita costs by 30 to 40 per cent. Potential annual savings in pharmacy and dentistry together in Ontario run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The authors show how a combination of competitive pressures and selective public intervention can be used to rationalize the delivery system. They caution, however, that such potential savings will be forever unrealized if a public-insurance type of program is introduced which freezes the existing system in place and forecloses the options of either public provision or private market competition.




Canadian Health Insurance


Book Description







Caring for Profit


Book Description

Caring For Profit traces how Canada's $77 billion a year health care industry is turning away from its original mandate of providing the best possible medical care to Canadians, and how multinational capital is forcing its way into our non'profit health care system. In Caring For Profit, Colleen Fuller traces alliances that were struck between private insurers and the medical profession during the 1950s and 1960s to defeat "socialized medicine". These alliances survived the establishment of medicare in Canada in 1968, and have been strengthened by new forces emerging in an era of globalization. Instead of a health care system focused on providing the highest quality of care to the greatest number of Canadians, the system is increasingly dominated by financial giants more concerned with consolidations, mergers, acquisitions, and higher profit margins. Caring for Profit is a "who's who" of key people and corporations making money in Canada's health care sector ? and a portrait of the strategies and alliances that threaten to replace the principles of medicare with the dictates of the stock market.




Cost and Competition in American Medicine


Book Description

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize. A witty meditation of the democratic responsibilites of the ordinary man, his duty to employer and family, and a poignant tale of thwarted idealism, this is perhaps Ishiguro's finest novel. The Remains of the Day is a charming, amusing and moving story which captures the reader's imagination from the first sentence.










Current Catalog


Book Description

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.










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