Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for rewriting the history of medicare a bit. Some people would argue that it was Saskatchewan and others would say it was Quebec, but that is a moot point.
The hon. member mentioned money. We keep hearing about money being a factor in providing effective health care. There is an English saying that necessity is the mother of invention. Because of necessity and because there has been very little money, provinces have begun to be inventive. It is not an invention that has decreased the quality of health care.
Something that has been necessary for many years which neither the provinces nor the federal government faced up to was that we needed to change our health care system to make it more appropriate to the needs of people and to make it more effectively and efficiently managed. As a result of the necessity, people are beginning to manage the system.
The amount of money put into a health care system by any study of any country does not equate to quality of care. Otherwise, as I said, the United States would have the most wonderful health care system in the world because it spends the most money. Yet Japan, which spends the least, has the best. There are more things that determine the health status of a country and the health of individuals than money spent on intervention and on medical care.
I spoke as well about the ways in which we could decrease the cost of the system, improve accessibility and improve the ability of patients to make decisions within their own health care system. That is by shifting from acute care to community care, by shifting and creating guidelines for care, by looking at outcome analysis and by setting up technology assessment, by doing all the things we are learning to do that some provinces have already begun to do.
Judith Maxwell of the University of Ottawa is predicting in her report that if we continue to do such things we will need to put less money, almost $7 billion less, into health care. It is very important to understand that and not fall prey to the rhetoric that continues to say that we should keep throwing money at health care in the hope that it will stick somewhere. It never has and it never will.
All the studies on mortality, morbidity and quality of life are telling us that is not what will create the outcome we are looking for.