Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Motion No. 484 having to do with the patient's bill of rights.
The leader of the NDP based her motion on recommendations issued by the Canadian Arthritis Society. The society should be congratulated on its initiative to raise awareness of the shortcomings of our health care system. Believe me, there are lots of them.
I would like to commend the initiative for recognizing the responsibility of the patients when it comes to their own health. That is very important as we look ahead. Ensuring that we pursue a healthy lifestyle in Canada is integral to saving the health care system in the 21st century. It is a new approach that we have talked about since the 1970s but have done precious little about.
I want to take a quick snapshot of a few issues, one of which is cigarette smoking. The health issues of one in every six patients is smoke related. If we can stop people from cigarette smoking until the age of 20, very few will pick up that habit which will devastate our health care system and which destroys the lives of so many Canadians.
A fit society is an integral link to the health of a nation. A whole generation of Canadians has grown up eating fast foods in front of television sets and computers. It will destroy our country if we do not do something about it.
We must look to some of the solutions for a healthy lifestyle and become knowledgeable about available treatments. Treatment plans are very important and we must actively participate in the decisions affecting our own bodies. With the advent of information on the Internet, many patients know more about their own bodies and illnesses before they walk into a doctor's office. It changes the dynamics. Many doctors have told me that is absolutely true. They have a hard time in this knowledge based economy staying on top of all the cures and all the different potentials. It will be much more of a team effort in the 21st century.
We have to be the leaders in active lifestyles and look at prevention in more than just what we do but also in what we eat. Health food stores are doing a booming business. We are a society that is concerned, and we need to be more concerned about building up our immune systems to prevent becoming ill.
Those are going to be some of the solutions in the 21st century. Co-operating fully with mutually acceptable courses of treatment, with physicians and the health care system, is one of the areas we would like to see us move forward on.
For the health care system to be sustainable we must become more accountable as to how we access the system. We can do this by becoming educated on the costs associated with the various access points. Canadians need to know that emergency wards in hospitals are more costly than their neighbourhood clinics. They have to know it is important for us to access those clinics if we are going to sustain the health care system. That is one small area of information that needs to be given to the patients. Increased accountability becomes an increased efficiency of the overall use of taxpayer dollars.
The Canadian Alliance supports the intent of the motion. In fact our newly ratified policy says that we would ensure a timely, sustainable and quality system for many generations to come, for all Canadians regardless of their financial means. That is what Canadians want. That is what has been reflected in our policy because we reflect the values of Canadians.
Unfortunately the motion glosses over some of the real problems of our health care system, one of which is the ongoing Liberal mismanagement of our health care system. We would not be talking about implementing elements of a patient's bill of rights if Canadians believed the Liberal government was doing a good job of managing our health care system.
The system as we know it is threatened by the baby boom bubble that is hitting it now. Motion No. 484 simply repeats what the Canadian Alliance has been requesting for some time now, the respect of the five principles of the Canada Health Act, with the additional sixth principle of sustainable funding.
That should not need to be there. It should be a given. It is just good practice. Yet what the Liberal government has done over the past decade has made it absolutely imperative. What happened to our health care system in the mid-90s must never happen again. We will lose it for sure if that repeats itself.
We need a government willing to live up to its commitment to deliver sustainable health care to the Canadian people. Our health care system has been on a downhill slide since 1993. We have been operating on nine years of crisis management in health care. The Liberal government's lack of planning and long term investment will take years for a Canadian Alliance government to fix.
I will talk a bit more about the motion which would recognize every patient's right to a timely and accurate diagnosis. It is accepted that when the Liberals came to power in 1993 they attempted to balance their books on the back of the health care system. They chose to finance government slush funds with dollars that should have gone into health care.
The Alliance Party would make the interests of health care users paramount. That would be the guiding principle of all its initiatives. We need to explore innovations to reduce waiting lists and improve quality of care. We must modernize the Canada Health Act where necessary to ensure timeliness, quality and sustainable health care service for Canada.
For the most part Canadians eventually receive the health care they require. The problem is that they do not get it in a timely fashion. For many of them it is too late and they do not make it on the waiting list. That is an absolute disgrace for our country. Many Canadians get sicker on waiting lists. We need to do something about that.
Waiting lists in Canada for surgeries, X-rays and basic checkups cause undue frustration and diminished quality of life. They reduce productivity levels in the workforce. Growing hospital waiting lists put pressure on family physicians to take on ever increasing caseloads and rush patients through to support their bottom lines. It has an effect on quality of care and accuracy of diagnosis. We need a government that supports health care professionals. It is not enough to claim to be a champion of the health care system. The actions of the Liberal government have shown Canadians otherwise.
The other part of the motion would ensure patients enjoyed the same quality of care wherever they lived. The government's neglect of the health care system has had enormous consequences. The provinces were forced to lay off thousands of health care professionals. It is absolutely amazing.
We are short a staggering number of health care professionals. Doctors tell us we need 2,500 more doctors per year to sustain the system. Nurses have come up with a study which says we need 112,000 new nurses in the next nine years to sustain the system. Enrolment in medical and nursing schools was cut back drastically in the mid-90s. The government was warned of the problem but did absolutely nothing about it. Funding has been scaled back for promised new medical technologies and the upgrade of obsolete equipment. All told, the government has withdrawn $25 billion from the CHST since it took office.
We must have sustainable and predictable funding to allow for the enforcement of the Canada Health Act. Instead the government has chosen an adversarial approach in dealing with the provinces. It is more interested in interference than co-operation. This hurts Canadians. When it comes to funding we have reduced real cash transfers to health care by 30%. Some 35% to 40% of provincial budgets go into health care while just 5% of federal money goes into it.
However throwing more money at the problem is not the answer. We need a new approach to reining in the escalating cost of drugs. We need to find more efficient ways to deliver health care. We need greater accountability within the system. We need to place greater emphasis on prevention and keeping people out of hospital in the first place.
The Liberal government has talked a good talk about protecting the health care system but has left it to the provinces to foot the bill. We have been left with a decade of drift. We need to change that if we are to stay in the system.