H E A L T H C A R E   P O L I C Y

Canadians often tell themselves that they enjoy “the best healthcare system in the world.” Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t support these claims. Despite very high per-capita spending levels, Canada’s healthcare system underperforms in comparison to a number of European countries, including the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Sweden. In many European countries, wait times for healthcare services are much shorter than in Canada. AIMS research focuses on identifying and measuring the performance gaps between Canada and some of its peer nations and on identifying policy strategies and global best practices that can help reduce wait times and improve patient care in Canada.

AIMS research in the healthcare sector also focuses on the development of policy ideas that can help strengthen the role of consumers themselves within the healthcare system. Our work examines global practices and policy ideas that provide patients with more access to information about their own health status and treatment options, enabling them to be active, leading participants in their own team of health care providers.

POLICY PAPERS & OP-ED COMMENTARIES

 

Issues in the Demand for Medical Care

Author: Brian Ferguson Issues in the Demand for Medical Care: Can Consumers and Doctors be Trusted to Make the Right Choices? explores the concept of physician induced demand, one of the fundamental underpinnings of the policy where government limits enrolment in medical schools and artificially limits the number of Canadian ...
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/ / Healthcare, Policy Papers

How Should We Decide What to Cover Under Medicare?

Author: Julia Witt How Should We Decide What to Cover Under Medicare? looks at the Oregon approach to health care coverage decision-making, and demonstrates how an improved version of the Oregon model would result in a truer reflection of the collective values of society's members in deciding what medical services ...
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/ / Healthcare, Policy Papers

Profits and the Hospital Sector

Author: Brian Ferguson Profits and the Hospital Sector: What does the Literature Really Say? explores the anti-for-profit bias in the public debate on health reform and concludes that there is, in fact, a considerable amount of evidence to show that there is no systematic differences in efficiency between for-profit and ...
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/ / Healthcare, Policy Papers

In Canadian Health Care Insurance

Author: David Zitner Zitner outlines how the government has abandoned their regulatory authority to ensure people receive the care they need. The government’s ability to play that regulatory role effectively is hampered because, as the ultimate provider of health care services, government is actually being asked to regulate itself – ...
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/ / Healthcare, Policy Papers

Better Medicine

Better Medicine: Reforming Canada’s Health Care, published in April 2002, is a brilliant collaboration of essays by some of Canada’s leading authorities in health care policy. Introduced and edited by Dr. David Gratzer, author of the award winning book “Code Blue”, and co-sponsored by AIMS, Atlantic Canada’s public policy think ...
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/ / Healthcare, Policy Papers
MEDIA MENTIONS

 

Importing health care, by exporting domestic patients

As a nation, we are constantly seeking out new free trade agreements. That is because we recognize the fundamental principle upon which free trade is based — that each country ...
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Picard on Health: Mixed medicine and messages

Privatization where necessary, but not necessarily privatization.by: Charles CirtwillI recently attended a lecture in Halifax delivered by Andre Picard entitled “Medicare: can it survive 25 more years”. To a large ...
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Two tier healthcare foisted on Canadians

The Capital Health District in Nova Scotia proclaims that about 20% of people have access to family doctors working with an interdisciplinary team and with access to community health teams ...
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Haphazard spending is bad for your health

As Darrell Dexter and our provincial government plead for more federal dollars for health care, Amanda Whitewood, a VP at Capital Health, courageously tells us the province and district have ...
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