Mr. Speaker, I always thought the whole point of this place is to exchange in a debate and so I am commenting in debate on the suggestions made by the Leader of the Opposition and all the subsequent members of the opposition.
To finish my thought, and hopefully without any further interruption, all the Leader of the Opposition said is to put more money into health care from the federal government but without raising taxes and he did not suggest how to get that money.
We learned from the member for New Brunswick Southwest that a minimum of $5 billion more is required for an infusion into health care, according to Senator Kirby's report, but in fact to cure the problems in health care delivery it is probably many billions of dollars more than that. I would submit that the answer is not more federal money and I am personally opposed to adding more federal money into the health care situation because I believe the savings and the money can be found elsewhere
That brings me to the Leader of the Opposition's second point. He suggested that we should consider the Alberta model of the private corporation delivery of health, in other words private clinics. The genesis of that point was the idea in Alberta that perhaps the public provision of health care delivery, which is usually by charitable non-profit organizations, could be more efficient if some of these services were provided by for-profit organizations, the idea being that the profit motive creates certain efficiencies.
I do not think we should discount that particular suggestion. It is a legitimate suggestion and the Leader of the Opposition was careful to point out that it would still be public care, that everyone would be entitled to equal care. The question would only be if in some instances the health care delivery would be better delivered by a private organization.
I suggest however that before we ever get to that point what we need to do is to make the health care delivery institutions more transparent and accountable. We would save, if we did that, all the money we need, in order to upgrade the current health system.
Mr. Speaker, you may not be aware of this but the $75 billion of government money that goes out to the health care institutions to provide health care delivery is not managed in any way that is legislatively transparent and accountable to the public. Hospitals which spend billions of dollars are not under the Canada Corporations Act save as a regime of guidelines of corporate governance. They do not operate under legislated standards of corporate governance.
Consequently if we talk to senior health care professionals we find them telling us that there is no administrative standard governing hospitals or health care institutions all across the country. In other words, one hospital may be operating effectively. Another hospital may not be operating effectively but there is no interchange of ideas. There is no parent standard from the national government or even the provincial governments.
Even in research hospitals have their own institutes of research and there is no peer exchange of ideas in the research that these institutes do. In other words, we have a situation where individual hospitals may be running a research institute operating as a charity or receiving money from a charitable foundation but there is no peer review of the actual work they are doing, other than when they finally come out and produce a paper and there is no coordination of the actual practices.
I point out that this extends to health care delivery, this problem of transparency and accountability. The Canadian Institute for Health Information, which was created about eight years ago by the health ministers federally and provincially, has disclosed all kinds of problems in the health care delivery system which all has to do with the failure to keep proper records and exchange information.
I will give just one example of the Canadian Institute for Health Information. It found in its research that there is no Canadian data on follow-up procedures in hospitals. It also estimates that there are 10,000 infection and non-error medication deaths in hospitals. The error basically boils down to when a doctor or nurse prescribes the wrong medication and the person dies. Because we are not a society in which litigation surrounding our medical practices is the norm, as it is in the United States, these accidents occur and for years and years there has been no follow-up and no central collection of data on these accidents.
While we all would like to believe that we have some of the best health care delivery in the world in Canada, the reality is that because of the lack of transparency in major hospitals and other health care delivery systems, only now are we beginning to realize that perhaps our health care delivery is not anything like as efficient as we would like to believe.
The analogy is very apt. If that is the case in health care delivery, where there are huge inefficiencies because of the lack of reporting, the lack of transparency, the need to exchange data, the lack of public accountability, then it is easy to conclude that there must be the same situation with the delivery mechanisms of hospitals and other health care institutions. In other words, if one does not have to tell anyone what one is doing, there can be nepotism and every kind of inefficiency imaginable.
If the total bill is $75 billion dollars a year of taxpayer money going into health care delivery and we have no way of knowing how administratively efficient that health care delivery system is, then I would suggest that at the very minimum, at a 10% minimum, we would get $7.5 billion to add into the health care delivery system. I would say that is just a minimum.
Therefore it becomes a no win game. When the federal government gives money to the provinces and the provinces give money to the health care delivery systems or institutions, and even the provinces cannot be sure how that money is being spent, what happens anecdotally is we occasionally find a situation where money is going out, which hopefully was to go toward some sort of magnetic resonance system or some other important piece of hospital machinery, for lawnmowers and garden care.
That is precisely the problem. We could save the money. We could reform the health care delivery system. We could do it all without an additional cent of money, if we brought hospitals and health care delivery systems under the Canada Business Corporations Act, where they would be forced to conform to proper standards of corporate governance, and finally under the Access to Information Act, because I suggest that if transparency is good for government, it is also good for those institutions that spend government dollars.