Developed within the context of the expansion of the Canadian welfare state in the years following the Great Depression, the present organization of Canadian health care delivery is now in serious need of reform. This book documents the causes and effects of changes made in this century to Canada's health care policy. Particular emphasis is placed on the decades following 1940, the years in which Canada moved away from an individualistic entrepreneurial medical care system, first toward a collectivist biomedical model and then to a social model for health care.

Despite notable variation in health care policy from province to province, most scholarship published on the health care system in Canada uses a broad national perspective. Focusing on the health care systems of individual Canadian provinces and territories, our new series, Health System Profiles, examines the social, political, economic, and epidemiological context of health care policy in each Canadian province. Turning a critical eye to the health care system in Nova Scotia, author Katherine Fierlbeck outlines the organizational and regulatory frameworks structuring provincial health care, while providing a detailed assessment of Nova Scotia’s health financing, physical infrastructure, service provision, and the efficacy of technological resources used in data tracking and health quality assessments. Structured for ease of comparison, Nova Scotia: A Health System Profile will, along with other volumes in the series, help scholars draw analytic evidence-based policy conclusions about the health system of Nova Scotia and other Canadian provinces and territories.

Is the Canadian health care system becoming a victim of its own success? It has done what it set out to do – provide universal access to all medically necessary health services without financial barriers to patients – but expanding technology, an aging population, and escalating costs strain its ability to continue. It is time to explore ways to reorient and restructure the health care system and the services it provides. At the Fourth Canadian Conference on Health Economics, contributors of international reputation addressed these concerns. Their papers, collected in this volume, consider a wide range of fundamental issues related to health care policies and structures. They discuss new developments in health care delivery, assess implications of such new policies as home care and health promotion, and propose concrete alternatives for restructuring the present system to sustain universal medicine.

The health care system in Canada is much-discussed in the international sphere, but often overlooked when it comes to its highly decentralized administration and regulation. Health Systems in Transition: Canada provides an objective description and analysis of the public, private, and mixed components that make up health care in Canada today including the federal, provincial, intergovernmental and regional dynamics within the public system. Gregory P. Marchildon’s study offers a statistical and visual description of the many facets of Canadian health care financing, administration, and service delivery, along with relevant comparisons to five other countries’ systems. This second edition includes a major update on health data and institutions, a new appendix of federal laws concerning select provincial and territorial Medicare legislation, and, for the first time, a comprehensive and searchable index. It also provides a more complete assessment of the Canadian health system based on financial protection, efficiency, equity, user experience, quality of care, and health outcomes. Balancing careful assessment, summary, and illustration, Health Systems in Transition: Canada is a thorough and illuminating look at one of the nation's most complex public policies and associated institutions.

This book begins with the international context for health care reform and then moves from coast to coast, setting out what is known about the reforms in health care privatization that are underway and about their impact on women.

Why has health care reform proved a stumbling block for provincial governments across Canada? What efforts have been made to improve a struggling system, and how have they succeeded or failed? In Paradigm Freeze, experts in the field answer these fundamental questions by examining and comparing six essential policy issues - regionalization, needs-based funding, alternative payment plans, privatization, waiting lists, and prescription drug coverage - in five provinces. Noting hundreds of recommendations from dozens of reports commissioned by provincial governments over the last quarter century - the great majority to little or no avail - the book focuses on careful diagnosis, rather than unplanned treatment, of the problem. Paradigm Freeze is based on thirty case studies of policy reform in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador. The contributors assess the nature and extent of healthcare reform in Canada since the beginning of the 1990s. They account for the generally limited extent of reform that has occurred, and identify the factors associated with the relatively few cases of large reform. An insightful new perspective on a problem that has plagued Canadian governments for decades, Paradigm Freeze is an important addition to the field of health policy. Contributors include John Church (University of Alberta), Michael Ducie (Alberta Health and Wellness), Pierre-Gerlier Forest (Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation), Stephen Tomblin (Memorial University), Jeff Braun Jackson (Ontario Professional Firefighters Association, Burlington, ON), Marie-Pascale Pomey (Université de Montréal), John N. Lavis (McMaster University), Harvey Lazar (Queen's University), Elisabeth Martin (Université Laval),Tom McIntosh (University of Regina), Dianna Pasic (McMaster University), Neale Smith (University of British Columbia), and Michael G. Wilson (McMaster University).

What too few people realize is that, as Andre Picard writes in his Foreword to Redistributing Health, "social justice--or lack thereof has a greater impact on the health of the population than the human genome, lifestyle choice, and medical treatment." The truth is that things like poverty, social exclusion, lack of meaningful employment, and lack of access to education or good housing contribute significantly to ill health in Canada--and none of these will be remedied by doctors or hospitals or pill bottles.