Saturday, September 18, 2004
This week, two of my fellow bloggers Bryan and James have made reference to the current Canadian Healthcare 'mess'. Check this out, courtesy of a cbc.ca Indepth feature:
The latest figures on what countries spend on health care come from 2002, when Canada spent 9.6 per cent of GDP on health care:
France 9.7%.
Germany 10.9%.
Denmark 8.8%.
Sweden 9.2%
At the high end of the scale is the United States, which spent 14.6 per cent of GDP on health care.
Now granted, Canada has upped its funding of health care the past 2 years (at least), so the 9.6% figure is undoubtedly low. However...
"If you look internationally, and you look at what you're getting for health-care spending, beyond about $600 or $700 US per person per year, there is literally no correlation between life expectancy, infant mortality, and how much you're spending," the University of Saskatchewan's Janice McKinnon said. "So countries that spend $800 to $1,000 Cdn have pretty much the same health care indicators as we do. And we're spending four times as much."
So, obviously something's wrong. Perhaps this is one of those things:
"We're spending more on drugs than we're spending on doctors in this country," D'Cruz said. "Drugs used to be nine per cent of the total spend in 1975 and drugs have now gone up to 16 per cent. Drugs have become the second most important component of health-care spending in this country."
I know, Canada needs a government-run pharmaceutical company! They could call it Pharma Canada.
Anyways, these cbc.ca Indepth features contain an incredible amount of information. Had I a paper to write on the state of health care, I have no doubt I could do it with only one item in the list of works cited: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/healthcare/index.html
Speaking of CBC articles about Medicare, here's another: http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_uselection/velk_20040915.html
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