Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to engage in the debate today on health care.
I had the privilege of hosting a health care forum in my riding only a few weeks ago, so I am very familiar with some of these issues. In attendance were the former Ontario deputy minister of health, some of the leaders of our hospitals, some primary care workers and some home care workers.
We are now having the debate in the House. Members have talked about money. They seem to think that the simple solution is just to put more money into health care and suddenly all the problems will go away.
Members will be interested to know that the health care workers themselves, while they of course would like more money, made the statement that it was not about money. Indeed, Canada is the fourth highest spender on health care in the world. We spend 9.6% of our GDP on health care, $86 billion a year. I have heard members of the Alliance, surprisingly enough, who are so cost conscious, say that maybe it should be 12%. I was quite incensed by that.
One of the conclusions of the health care forum that I put on was that we could not continue to put money in the top of this thing because it was not coming out the bottom and it was not being delivered to the patients.
Do we have a problem in health care? Yes, we do. We have a problem getting the newest technology. If we look at the waiting lists, we see that they are getting longer and, at the same time, we are paying more money for the system. There is definitely something wrong with the system.
We also see that our health care costs have been rising at the rate of about 5% a year and are scheduled, because of our demographics and our aging population, to continue to rise. People say it will rise as high as 6%.
Mr. Speaker, I do not have to tell you, as I know you have studied the economy quite a bit, but our economy is only expanding at the rate of 3% a year. In other words, health care costs are actually rising twice as fast as the economy is growing. Obviously, we cannot continue that because instead of talking about tax cuts, we would be talking about tax increases to maintain a system like that.
There is no question that we need some changes in the health care system but what changes are needed? Maybe some doctors are listening to this today and I do not want to offend them, but one of the comments I heard was that a normal doctor-patient ration is about 2,000 patients to 1 doctor. There are differences depending upon specialization and so forth, but as a general comment, as a quick working tool, based on the province of Ontario's population base, we should have about 5,000 doctors. In fact there are 9,000 doctors in the province of Ontario and I am told Ontario is screaming for more doctors.
What is the problem when we look at that quantitative analysis? One of the other members actually mentioned some of the structural problems. It would appear that many doctors are not engaged in the practice of medicine or, seemingly, not on a full time basis. In fact, it is thought that almost 40% of their time is taken up with administrative duties, such as filling in forms, pushing papers and so forth because of structural problems. By the way, these are structural problems that provinces have put in place.
I dare say that the whole question of malpractice also creeps into this, the question of how to protect oneself in public liability cases. This has created a big paper burden as well for the medical profession. The reality it that these structural problems have basically created a health care system which, quite frankly, is broken and is not working.
By the way, I will be splitting my time with another member.
We can agree on a number of things. First, I do not think we have full agreement about money. I hear politicians of all stripes saying “Another $4 billion on the table will solve all of our problems”. That is not so. If it were $4 billion this year, it would be another $4 billion year after year after year. It will never go away and the system will not get any better because we will not have changed the structural problems with health care.
What are some of the problems in health care as I perceive them? Some of them are that we do not have an integrated health care system. In many of the regions we do not integrate the health care system itself. In other words, when somebody gets sick at home and has to go to the hospital, a bunch of health care providers are involved in that: ambulance drivers, paramedics and so forth. In fact, by the time the person actually ends up in the hospital almost 40% of the costs have got nothing to do with health care workers.
How do we integrate those services to ensure a proper delivery of the system? What occurred to me is that in many parts of this country we do not have a fully integrated health care system. We are not using some of our best technology. We know that we are in a technological revolution but if we go to some of our hospitals, although we do see doctors working on computers rather than working on patients, we also see a lot of people pushing paper around. We also find that we cannot track patients. In other words, we do not have the simple technology of a health card with a computer chip on it that gives information on our health record when we travel from one place to another in this country. We have the technology to do that but we are not spending the money on the technology to make it more efficient. In that sense, we are not using the new technology available.
Because we have so much inefficiency within the health care system, we have also made choices on how we spend the money. We have spent money in areas where it is not very efficient and we have neglected to spend money on those things that are important, like investing in new technologies. I am not just talking about information systems, but also the newest equipment that we need to keep our people healthy.
There is no question that people are healthier today than they were 15 years ago. We would rather be sick today than 15 years ago. All the talk in the House about the health care system being a terrible system has been a little bit overexaggerated.
What are people looking for? They understand that the system is not up to speed. They also recognize that the Canadian population is an aging population and that this problem is just going to continue to get worse. The reality is that they do not really care.
When I had my health care forum, I was amazed that people did not care whether it was the federal or provincial government that was presenting the health care forum. All they wanted was somebody to take some leadership on this file, solve these problems and stop all the finger-pointing back and forth between governments about who is responsible for what. It is not about private health care as opposed to public health care. It is about how we can make the existing system work better.
There are some ways we can make the system work better. We must have an accountability framework to find out what people are concerned about in this country. People are concerned about getting 24 hour primary care. They are concerned about the long waiting lists that they are suffering in getting to see a specialist, in getting specific knee transplant operations, or whatever the case may be. We can define the targets.
What do we have to do as a government? Unfortunately, or some may say, fortunately, we do not administer the health care system. We are simply the givers of money. People are fed up with that kind of attitude. It is not about giving money. The federal government must re-impose a vision of health care in this country. That vision must be from sea to sea to sea and it must be based on basic standards that people find acceptable.
When we put the money on the table we are going to say that we are putting it on the table but under certain conditions. The conditions will be that these objectives may not be met today, but that over a period of time we must see progress in creating a better health care system or there will be no more money.
Maybe some of the provinces will not buy into this accountability network. We must also get the provinces working together. The provinces must have their own permanent registry system so that they can determine best practices between provinces. One of the other members talked about the inter-transfers between provinces not working well. The sharing of best practices between provinces does not exist. The sharing of medical records does not seem to exist. We have to do these fundamental things in order to have a better health care system.
I believe that is what the Canadian people want. They want to stop this silly debate that we are having in the House and in the media about money, money, money. This is not just about money. It is a much more difficult problem to solve. We have it within our power to solve it. That is the vision that this government has going forward.