Canada has been among the world leaders in recognizing the multiple factors that impact health. Focusing on Canada’s health care system, Raisa B. Deber provides brief descriptions of some key facts and concepts necessary to understand health care policy in Canada and place it in an international context. An accessible guide, Treating Health Care unpacks key concepts to provide informed discussions that help us understand and diagnose Canada’s health care system and to clarify which proposed changes are likely to improve it - and which are not. This book provides background information to clarify such concepts as: determinants of health; how health systems are organized and financed (including international comparisons); health economics; health ethics; and roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders, including government, providers, and patients. It then addresses some key issues, including equity, efficiency, access and wait times, quality improvement and patient safety, and coverage and payment models. Using analysis rather than advocacy, Deber provides a toolkit to help understand health care and health policy.

This book provides insight into how the Canadian health care system is financed and organized, how it has evolved over time, and how well it performs relative to peer countries.

While Canadians are proud of their healthcare system, the reality is that it is fragmented and disorganized. Instead of a pan-Canadian system, it is a "system of systems" - thirteen provincial and territorial systems and a federal system. As a result, Canadian healthcare has not only become one of the costliest in the world, but is falling well behind many developed countries in terms of quality. Canadians increasingly realize that their healthcare system is no longer fiscally sustainable, yet change remains elusive. The standard claim is that Canada's multijurisdictional approach makes system-wide reform nearly impossible. Toward a Healthcare Strategy for Canadians disputes this reasoning, making the case for a comprehensive, system-wide, made-in-Canada healthcare strategy. It looks at the mechanics of change and suggests ways in which the various participants in the system - governments, healthcare professionals, the private sector, and patients - can work collaboratively to transform a second-rate system. Addressing critical issues of health human resources, electronic health records, integrated care, and pharmacare, Toward a Healthcare Strategy for Canadians shows how a system-wide strategic approach to this crucial policy area can make a difference in Canada’s healthcare system in the future.

Longlisted for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction 2018 Dr. Danielle Martin sees the challenges in our health care system every day. As a family doctor and a hospital vice president, she observes how those deficiencies adversely affect patients. And as a health policy expert, she knows how to close those gaps. A passionate believer in the value of fairness that underpins the Canadian health care system, Dr. Martin is on a mission to improve medicare. In Better Now, she shows how bold fixes are both achievable and affordable. Her patients’ stories and her own family’s experiences illustrate the evidence she presents about what works best to improve health care for all. Better Now outlines “Six Big Ideas” to bolster Canada’s health care system. Each one is centred on a typical Canadian patient, making it clear how close to home these issues strike. · Ensure every Canadian has regular access to a family doctor or other primary care provider · Bring prescription drugs under medicare · Reduce unnecessary tests and interventions · Reorganize health care delivery to reduce wait times and improve quality · Implement a basic income guarantee to alleviate poverty, which is a major threat to health · Scale up successful local innovations to a national level Passionate, accessible, and authoritative, Dr. Martin is a fervent supporter of the best of medicare and a persuasive critic of what needs fixing.

Caring For Profit traces how Canada's $77 billion a year health care industry is turning away from its original mandate of providing the best possible medical care to Canadians, and how multinational capital is forcing its way into our non'profit health care system. In Caring For Profit, Colleen Fuller traces alliances that were struck between private insurers and the medical profession during the 1950s and 1960s to defeat "socialized medicine". These alliances survived the establishment of medicare in Canada in 1968, and have been strengthened by new forces emerging in an era of globalization. Instead of a health care system focused on providing the highest quality of care to the greatest number of Canadians, the system is increasingly dominated by financial giants more concerned with consolidations, mergers, acquisitions, and higher profit margins. Caring for Profit is a "who's who" of key people and corporations making money in Canada's health care sector ? and a portrait of the strategies and alliances that threaten to replace the principles of medicare with the dictates of the stock market.

A powerful argument for a new health-care system.