Having Our Gas and Selling it Too
This third paper in AIMS Oil and Gas Series underlines that while natural gas markets in other jurisdictions across Canada and the continent are quite mature, here in Atlantic Canada natural gas has a virtually zero market share.
Health care: competition and the single payer
Provinces now pay over 85 per cent of the cost of increasingly costly public health care. This burden is inevitably driving governments to adopt an attitude of ever-greater neutrality between public and private suppliers of health care within our single-payer system. In this column, AIMS President, Brian Lee Crowley, explains the benefits to be gained when provincial governments act as purchasers of health care services on behalf of their citizens. Governments will soon buy health services wherever they can get the best quality and best access at the lowest price. Neither public nor private providers will get preferential treatment, and the general public will get better quality, more accessible health care because of it. Publication: CHH & MTT & VS & CH & OC, January 30, 2002
AIMS On-Line for late January 2002
Here is what's new at AIMS, Atlantic Canada's Public Policy Think Tank
Drug Use in Canada: Opportunity Lost
In this piece from the Ottawa Citizen, AIMS Fellow in Health Care Policy, Dr. David Zitner, amplifies the theme of AIMS recently released research paper, Public Health, State Secret. He emphasizes that, although the Canadian government is spending huge amounts of tax-payer money on health information, they are gaining little useful knowledge about what is really happening in the current system. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of pharmaceuticals. Dr. Zitner stresses that although Canadians ingested over $15 billion in drugs and complementary medicines last year, no one knows whether their affects were harmful or helpful. No Canadian province has routine systems to systematically inquire and learn about the outcomes of pharmaceuticals, although they would inform clinicians about the results of the care they provide, and save lives. Dr. Zitner is Director of Medical Informatics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Publication: OC, January 28, 2002
Unhealthy secrecy surrounds public health care
Due to conflict of interest, governments avoid clear performance measures for medicare
Public Health, State Secret
Dr. David Zitner and AIMS president Brian Lee Crowley demonstrate that politicians and senior health officials simply don’t know where or why medicare is failing because they still lack the proper tools to evaluate the quality or timeliness of the care Canadians receive.