Mr. Speaker, during the last number of years a significant trend has occurred in health care in Canada in relation to the average length of stay that Canadians have in hospitals. In Ontario alone the average length of stay has reduced from some seven days to about 4.2 days.
There has also been a major shift toward ambulatory care. Rather than having people go to the hospital and wait for a day for surgery and so on, they come in on the same day of surgery and are out a lot quicker; similarly with regard to maternity.
The member should also appreciate that there have been substantial changes in medical technology as well as in medications and that in fact Canadians are living longer today than they have historically. They continue to live longer. In addition there has been a tremendous elimination of duplication of services between hospitals and community agencies.
All this results in a substantial reduction in health care costs. Yet the member will clearly find out, if he checks the figures, that our health care institutions province by province have been able to service as many or more Canadians with less facilities. Those are the savings.
Because the savings have been achieved by the provinces the federal government has not achieved any benefit from the savings. The member should realize that health care is much cheaper to provide now and that the cuts simply reflect the lower cost of providing health care to all Canadians.