Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to speak to the committee.
I am going to speak to you in English, but I am always ready to try to answer your questions in French.
I thought I would take a moment to make sure that everyone on the committee understands on whose behalf I am speaking today: the provincial and the territorial health associations and organizations across the country. This runs from the Newfoundland and Labrador Health Boards Association, through the Health Association of Nova Scotia, all the way across to the Health Employers Association of British Columbia, and also into the territories.
You may have heard of us many years ago as the Canadian Hospital Association, but we now cover the continuum of health, and thus our name reflects the broader mandate. We're currently celebrating our 80th year of work on behalf of Canadians.
Our board of directors is a bit different from many in the health world. It reflects the face of the public. Members have emerged from local hospital and health boards. They've risen to govern at the provincial level and they now come to speak at the national level with CHA. They are HR experts from the mining and forestry sectors, registrars of community colleges, superintendents of educational systems, and chartered accountants. They run insurance companies and real estate firms; they work in sales and retail. They are the public, they are the voters, and they have strong messages to deliver. Perhaps most importantly, they are responsible for the allocation and monitoring of billions of dollars of public funds.
You have asked us to help you deal with ongoing difficult financial times, and we get that. You've asked us to bring concrete, doable solutions. We get that as well. You've asked us to be as specific as possible and you've also asked us to limit our recommendations to three.
Well, we have more than three, but we're committed to respecting the committee's parameters and we're pleased to offer three concrete, doable recommendations, which I'll briefly review today, knowing that you have received the material in advance.
One additional comment that I would make before I do so is that CHA supports a very strong role for federal leadership in the health of the nation within our Canadian model, which confers the constitutional responsibility for health to the provinces and territories. We specifically require that this federal leadership help us move from a focus only on the illness system to one that truly addresses the need for a wellness system. We need to keep Canadians out of hospitals; we need to prevent their becoming ill and move them quickly from acute care to appropriate continuing care; and again, we need courageous federal leadership to do so.
That is a nice segue into the first recommendation.
The recommendation is to reduce health system costs over time and target funds from current resources—new ones, if we have them, but current resources—to population health initiatives. The Naylor report, with which you're probably familiar—and I can go into more detail, of course—recommends funding public health services in the amount of $1.1 billion per year and is a good starting point. The annual economic burden of direct and indirect costs of illness in Canada is estimated to be $188 billion. We need prevention. There is currently no earmarked funding for health promotion and disease or illness prevention activities under the Canada health transfer to date.
Recommendation number two is to leave needed dollars in the health system by modernizing and bringing equity to the current interpretation of rules concerning the GST-HST rebate eligibility criteria in the Excise Tax Act. This is a complicated issue, but we estimate that $300 million is being taken out of the health system. It's being given with one hand and taken away with the other, and we feel it needs to stay where it is initially given.
Our recommendation number three is to enhance the health sector. It's about EHR and EMR, folks. We need to get these moving. There are funds being made available to emerging health professionals only within the physicians', nursing, and pharmacists' professions. The rest of the workforce has never had this training. If we truly want to start taking advantage of the innovative processes and pieces that are coming forward, there are programs existing, we feel, that could be opened to these other health professionals to make them more amenable to the new technologies.
I will finish with a thank you for hearing me, and I look forward to questions.