[HALIFAX] – Today AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley announced that, for the second time in three years, the Institute has been honoured by the international think tank community. AIMS is once again on the short list for the prestigious Sir Antony Fisher Memorial Prize for the Institute’s recent paper on health care, Operating in the Dark. The paper is available here.
The prize commemorates the life and work of Sir Antony Fisher, one of the founders of the prestigious Institute for Economic Affairs in London, England. Over 20 nominations for the Fisher Prize were made this year, from public policy institutes in Turkey, Belgium, UK, Venezuela, Ecuador, the USA and Canada. Topics covered globalism, welfare privatization, environmentalism, social security, health care, free trade, liberty and democracy and more.
The panel of judges includes Nobel Laureate James Buchanan, former Deputy Editor of The Economist newspaper, Norman MacRae, world-renowned economics professor, Israel Kirzner, and many other prestigious figures. Winners will be announced in Milan, Italy on April 12, 2000.
Operating in the Dark garnered considerable attention when it was published in November 1999 for its argument that the health care system could not be properly managed because managers and policymakers did not have access to vital information about the system’s performance. The paper also argued that if Canadians wanted to preserve the key elements of the system, and particularly a tax-financed approach that did not distribute medical care on the ability to pay, then greater private sector participation in health care provision was virtually unavoidable.
Alberta Premier Ralph Klein tabled the AIMS report in the Alberta legislature, and referred to it in a major interview in The Globe and Mail as helping to show the way forward for the Canadian health care system.
AIMS won the Fisher Award in 1997 for its first book, Looking the Gift Horse in the Mouth. You can read Gift Horse here.
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