Mr. Chairman, I agree with the minister and with most of the polls across this country that say that health care is the number one issue across this land.
It is also the number one concern of the electorate for sure who are responding to polls or talking in the coffee shops regarding the issues of the country. They value their health care system very much. It is important that they have at least the sense that their concerns are being dealt with as they wrestle with the problems as they see them because they are troubled. They are disheartened about some of the problems they are experiencing.
We can argue all evening about whether health care is in crisis or not. That is a fruitless argument. Some people say that just throwing more money at it will solve the problem. I disagree with that. Other people say that we should go for a complete overhaul of the system in some way. Then there are others who say that it is not in crisis at all and is just fine the way it is. The truth of the matter is that if we are one of those people on a waiting list or laying in a gurney in a hospital or laying in bed at home with our muscles atrophying because we cannot get into the system, it is in crisis today. We must recognize that.
It is important to Canadians and to the Canadian Alliance. We went on an extensive look at health care in this last year trying to discern exactly where Canadians were. We looked at our policy to see what Canadians were thinking and feeling about health care. We launched that last spring, revised our policy and it was accepted at the national assembly in April. We based our policy on four principles.
First, people want to get into a system in a timely way. They do not want to have their muscles atrophying while they are on a waiting list. That is unacceptable.
Second, when they get into the system they want it to be a quality system, one that they know can deal with the concerns that they have and is not second rate.
Third, they want it there not only for themselves but for their families, their grandchildren and for generations to come. They want it to be sustainable.
Finally, they want every Canadian to be able to access it regardless of the financial means.
That is how we must look at our system. That is what Canadians want. However, they want to change the focus from an institutional system to a patient driven system, one that they are paying for. They are the ones that the system should be concerned with. It should be focused around them rather than around the system.
Let us look at the legacy of the government over the last 10 years when it comes to health care. There has been a lack of importance put on the system. The government leads by polls and by spin. When it comes to health care that just does not work. We actually have to lead to drive health care and to sustain it into the future.
In the 1990s we saw the government pull $25 billion out of health care. The former finance minister is one individual who takes his share of the blame on this. What exactly happened to health care once that money was pulled out of it? This is a government that uses health care as a weapon going into an election, as a lever we might say.
This is not the first time we have seen a royal commission or an extensive commission on health care. The national forum on health in 1997, prior to an election, sits on a shelf collecting dust. There is absolutely very little, if anything, coming out of that forum that was implemented.
There are some things that the government does well, that is, study health care. It has put $242 million into studying health care in the last 10 years. That figure comes from a question we sent to the parliamentary library. It was not us who tallied the dollars. It was the Library of Parliament.
I would like to make mention of the September 2000 accord because it was a golden opportunity for renewing health care, if we want to use that word. It was a missed opportunity, just prior to the election I might add. There is $21 billion that does not go in right away. In fact, not a cent of that went in until April 1 of the following spring, except for the billion dollars that was mishandled and the other half a billion dollars that was for information technology.
If members want to look under a stone, just take a look at where that money went. It was probably treated very similarly to the billion dollars in technology that went toward floor scrubbers, steam cookers and lawn mowers. There was $486 million that was unaccounted for. This is almost two and a half years from the time that money was allocated.
There are major problems. What kind of a system do we have right now? We have waiting lists that are growing longer all the time. We have obsolete medical equipment. We have a critical shortage of medical professionals: 2,500 doctors are needed to stay in the system per year, and 110,000 new nurses are needed within the next eight to ten years just to keep up. Because of such a lack of health care professionals the system and the morale within our facilities are unbelievably disturbing.
The federal-provincial acrimony over health care and the Canada Health Act is something that should have been fixed many years ago. There was a promise in 1999 for a dispute settlement mechanism. We got that, but only after a gun was held to the head of the minister. Sadly there are too many other personal horror stories in health care.
What has happened? Canadians have lost their confidence when it comes to what is happening in health care. A Statistics Canada opinion poll released in January reported that the number of Canadians who felt the health care system was not meeting their needs rose 50% in the last four years. More than half of the respondents reported that health care problems led them not to pursue treatment in our health care system. That gives us an idea of how people are thinking.
Let us look ahead and take a look at what is coming if we are considering saving health care. The Canadian population is aging. The percentage of those who were over 65 in 1981 was 9.7% and 12.5% in 2000. It will be 14.6% by 2010 and by 2031, 23.6% of the population will be over the age of 65.
Why are we so concerned about that? It is because from age 45 to 65 we spend an average of $1,800 per patient. From 65 to 75 it is $4,000. That is over double within a 10 year span. From 75 to 85 it goes to $7,500. At 85 and over it is $14,000 a year. That is why we are concerned.
If we look ahead with the same system we have a problem coming. Coupled on top of that the kind of problems we have with obese children or unfit children, as I like to say, in our student population who will have heart and stroke problems at age 30 instead of 60 and 70, it will multiply that problem. Clearly we have a problem in health care.
What are some of the solutions? We should allow the federal government do what it can do and allow the provinces to do what they can do. The federal government can deal with the Canada Health Act. Canadians have bought into the Canada Health Act, although it has been compromised in all five principles in every one of the provinces. We really must do something with the Canada Health Act to make it a quality system. We must rejuvenate it and look at how we can deal with a health system that is going into the 21st century. It has not been looked at since 1984. It has to consider such things as quality, timeliness, sustainability and accountability. These new principles must be considered as we look into that.
The other thing is the dollars and cents. How will we pay for the system? The Canadian Alliance strongly believes that never again should a government be able to pull those moneys out of the health care system and balance the books of the nation on the back of health care. Therefore we added a sixth principle. We say that we should have stable five year funding at a minimum for health care to be able to sustain it into the future.
However more money is not the only solution. Every one of the reports from the provinces, whether it is Fyke, Mazankowski, Kirby and even the Romanow commission, will all say that more money is not the only solution. We must do more than that.
When we look at some of the serious considerations of our health care system and the number one driver of costs we understand that it is drugs. We must do something about that. Not only must we do something about the cost of drugs and the availability of them, we must do more than that. We must look at the safety of drugs. We have problems in drugs that are unbelievable. Approximately $15.5 billion was spent on drugs in 2001, up 8.6%. That is a serious problem.
We must also umbrella everything that we talk about under health care promotion and look at more than crisis management. We have crisis managed health care for the last three or four decades. We must look beyond that. We must look at it as health promotion and wellness. We must look upstream much further than that if we are going to sustain the system into the future.
We have great challenges in health care. We have great opportunities as well. We need greater accountability and transparency, more stability of funding, more flexibility and innovation, more co-operation with the provinces and more honest and open debate.