Comments on: The Canada We Want in 2020: Securing our Health System for the Future

By: Janusz

Janusz — Sat, 05 May 2012 02:28:17 +0000

In 1987, in Switzerland, I used to pay SFr 321.00 per month for health insurance of my family of 2 adults and 1 child.
I had a choice of private, semi-private or geneal room in hospital and a choice of services I wanted covered. Health insurance premium was tax deductible. That I call transparent, fair, simple, stable and INDEPENDENT FROM POLITICS OF THE DAY.
Please do not reinvent the wheel, do what Swiss do and we’ll all be OK. There is no shame in learning from masters.
Good day!

By: Diana Carney

Diana Carney — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:48:15 +0000

Thanks, Susan, for these thoughts. This is a very important area for the future. We look forward to hearing about the work you are doing on performance measurement.

By: Susan Brien

Susan Brien — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:29:26 +0000

In his contribution to the Canada 2020 report, Dr. Philippe Couillard recommends that health care in Canada become more cost-effective. According to numbers from an OECD report drawing on data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, health care spending in Canada in 2009 (as a percent of GDP) was the 6th highest of OECD countries, spending less than the US and France but more than the United Kingdom and Australia (http://www.oecd.org/document/38/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_48289894_1_1_1_1,00.html). However, despite the high expenditures, Canada has variable health care system performance and outcomes compared to other OECD countries (http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/products/learning_from_thebest_en.pdf ).
Getting better value for health care dollars spent requires a solid understanding of health care system performance and health outcomes, and more specifically, how the two are linked. Current performance measures in Canada tend to focus on health processes and outputs (think: wait times, volumes of procedures) that aren’t direct measures of patient outcomes. Furthermore, measures of the efficiency of health care spending are less than ideal. Future work in performance measurement should concentrate on determining the true effectiveness of our health care system and developing better measures for health care spending.