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Restoring The Purpose of The Canada Health Transfer: Alberta The Only Province To Benefit From The New Funding Formula
Restoring The Purpose of The Canada Health Transfer: Alberta The Only Province To Benefit From The New Funding Formula
ca
http://umanitoba.ca/outreach/evidencenetwork/archives/14724
expensive provincial health system in Canada? To remedy this, we propose an alternative formula that adjusts for two health care cost drivers over which provincial governments have no control: demographic aging and geographic dispersion. Those provinces and territories with both a more highly dispersed and an older population would receive more CHT. Think about Labrador as well as the northern and rural areas of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Those provinces with either an extremely young demographic (Alberta) or a highly urbanized population (Ontario) would receive less. Altering the CHT in this way would assist provinces facing unavoidably higher health costs to continue to provide medicare services of roughly comparable quality under the five criteria of the Canada Health Act. In other words, the CHT would again serve a national policy purpose, not automatically dish out money based blindly on a population count. Canadians want to know that their citizenship means something more than being the resident of an individual province. They want to know that they will have access to needed medical services without financial barriers wherever they live in the country. It is time to revisit the original purpose of the CHT. Gregory Marchildon is an expert advisor with EvidenceNetwork.ca, and along with Haizhen Mou, teaches in the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, an interdisciplinary centre for public policy research, teaching and executive training at the Universities of Regina and Saskatchewan.