Charest promises greater health freedom
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It’s the kind of coverage announcement positive to get tongues wagging. Conservative management contender Jean Charest is promising that, if elected, he’ll change the Canada Well being Act to permit provinces higher flexibility in health-care supply.
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For many who set themselves up as defenders of Canada’s public well being system, this can be taken as code for privatizing the system, however Charest says it’s about strengthening the one payer system. He’s additionally framing the coverage change as defending Canada from future lockdowns by constructing capability.
“We’d not have been pressured to have lockdowns had our healthcare system had the flexibility to soak up the additional instances coming in with COVID,” Charest mentioned.
Many of the lockdowns imposed by provincial governments in the course of the COVID pandemic had been finished to guard hospital capability. With fewer beds, particularly within the intensive care models, provinces had been pressured to close down extra typically and for longer intervals than different jurisdictions with comparable well being methods.
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“In each class, from ICU and hospital beds per capita, to medical doctors and nurses per capita, to attend instances for primary procedures, Canada is close to the underside of the OECD rankings regardless of spending greater than most international locations that outperform us,” he mentioned.
Charest is promising to permit provinces to permit a higher diploma of personal supply of healthcare inside the public system that means that even when a surgical procedure is finished in a personal clinic, the process can be paid for with the affected person’s well being card, not their bank card.
It’s one thing Charest has expertise with.
Within the 2005 Chaoulli case, the Supreme Courtroom dominated that Quebec couldn’t prohibit entry to personal well being providers. Since then, the province has seen an abundance of personal well being providers on supply, together with many paid for by the general public system. Whereas that is allowed in Quebec, the Trudeau authorities lately threatened to withhold well being funding for Saskatchewan for utilizing non-public well being supply to clear backlogs.
