I'm the kind of academic who's willing to say that if we want to spend more in some areas a cap on medical care spending may be appropriate, especially if it's targeted at going at GDP, which is effectively what we're talking about after 2017. Even between now and 2015-16 we will see medical care spending go up publicly, just through the Canada health transfer. It's $7 billion a year.
Are we confident that this investment will actually get us the biggest bang for our buck when we want to have a healthier society? It's no longer clear to me that an additional investment in illness treatment is the way to be promoting health when we are reasonably strong at doing medical care already, yet we have a range of policy issues, not the least of which is policies for families with young kids, in which we are consistently ranked terribly poorly.