Thank you, Chair, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to address your Standing Committee on Finance as part of your pre-budget consultation. I'm joined by our CEO, Mr. William Tholl.
In keeping with the general theme set by your committee, our presentation, “Medicine for a More Competitive Canadian Economy”, focuses on enhancing Canada's place in a competitive world from a health perspective.
I'm going to speak to you briefly today about three important issues: one, nutrition and child obesity; two, wait times; and three, electronic health records.
Firstly, in relation to nutrition, in order to improve competitiveness there is no better way to start than investing in people. Few things threaten the future productivity of our workforce more than our growing childhood obesity epidemic. Here are the facts known to you: over a quarter of our children are overweight, obese, and not active, and the percentage is growing. This leads to health problems down the road. We feel there are direct links between these health problems and absenteeism, which costs employers $16 billion per year.
What you might consider is measures such as tax incentives and disincentives to encourage and empower Canadians, particularly younger Canadians, to make healthier choices for themselves and their families. I would urge the committee to address nutritional and obesity issues with the same resolve as given to tobacco control. When it comes to health, especially the health of our children, government must use every policy lever at its disposal, including the tax system, to empower Canadians to make healthy choices.
Secondly, in relation to wait times, as detailed in our brief, health care investments not only lead to a higher quality of life, but they drive overall economic competitiveness and productivity. Nowhere is this link between health and economic performance more evident than in the impact of excessive wait times on our economy. This year alone, we estimate that in just four of the ten provinces alone, on recent data, this cost could be as high as $2 billion. Not only are Canadians suffering because of excess wait times; businesses and governments are feeling the pain through absenteeism and lower tax revenue.
In our brief, we recommend a number of strategic investments to reduce wait times and improve the quality of care to our patients. Key to achieving meaningful reduction on wait times is a patient care guarantee, and therefore once again we would urge the committee to endorse the CMA's Canada health access fund.
As well, we've included a very modest but very important recommendation to sustain and increase funding to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
Finally, I'd like to bring to your attention that Canadian physicians own and operate in excess of 30,000 small businesses and employ about 142,000 people across the country. In many cases, governments have not placed an appropriate emphasis or level of investment on developing and cultivating innovation in this unique sector of the small business community.
An example of how the federal government could invest directly in innovation in the small business sector is by automation of our offices through the development and implementation of the electronic health record, the so-called EHR. It is estimated that EHR could provide annual systemwide savings in the range of $6 billion and both reduce wait times and absenteeism. However, this can only be realized if all physicians' offices across the country are fully automated. Therefore, we have recommended increased funding for Canada Health Infoway to develop and implement EHR with a targeted investment towards total physician's office automation.
In conclusion, I would ask the members to consider us as investments, not costs. In profiling nutrition, children's health and obesity, wait times, and the electronic health record here today, I hope I can show you that investment in health can offer both short- and long-term investments. In sum, sir, I urge you to invest in people, to invest in our health care system, and to invest in infrastructure, particularly the electronic health care record.
I look forward to your questions.