Health committee  I don't think our organization believes or disbelieves. We think that change in health care should be based on evidence, so if you do something, track it and look at it in five years, and ask both the equity questions, the optimal outcome questions—

Health committee  It also depends on what you mean by private. If you look at global evidence, there isn't evidence anywhere that suggests that a massive private delivery is going to offer equitable, high-quality health care.

Health committee  The important question to pose is this: is the payment for services private? That's one big thing, and certainly the study I was citing said no. It didn't get to that; it just said there's enough money in the public system now to do what we need to do, if we're able to work up th

Health committee  I think what Quebec--and I'm sure they're doing this--and the federal government should be doing is evaluating very carefully whether these forays into private medicine are delivering the outcomes that were hoped for. How are the costs being spread around? Are people getting good

Health committee  Instead of talking about the government, we should be talking about governments. As I just said, the provinces have the power to act, but the policy surrounding this makes the task very difficult for them. For example, when the Government of Ontario decided to use nurse practiti

Health committee  Very quickly, I think the federal government's capacity to facilitate the sharing of knowledge of what works across the country, the reports of committees like yours but also reports on what's working, and also facilitating discussions among the provincial officials at the workin

Health committee  The reality is that practically since the ink began to dry on medicare, there have been studies and reports done in Canada on different ways of organizing health services. In fact, when I was a young analyst, I worked on the Manitoba white paper on health policy, which talked abo

Health committee  There are in fact other models in other countries, but there are also models of doing it in Canada. It's just that they don't get expanded. The study from the Mowat Centre that Will Falk did focused on some of that. But also, even within the acute care setting, different profess

Health committee  I think the research on that question is rather like the research Dr. Badley looked at. In looking at all the papers that make a lot of very big assumptions, there isn't a lot of evidence associated with them. I think the research that needs to be done is the kind of research w

Health committee  Again, as Dr. Badley said, in a year, if you're still studying this, we will have a much better answer, because this will have been looked at together with the organizations and institutions that are actually delivering the care.

Health committee  That's a very good question. I think that the Canadian Medical Association has already suggested investing much more money into sharing innovations. We fully agree with the association. In fact, the opportunities for action by the federal government are limited, except in the ca

Health committee  This is a really interesting question. Certainly, except for the extraordinary political difficulty of doing it, this is something that provinces can do. I guess the interesting question would be whether there is a way to sweeten the pot. The fact is that if a province is very br

Health committee  That actually raises the much broader question about the way we organize health services. If you imagine Ottawa, there isn't anybody in Ottawa whose job it is to be responsible for all the initiatives that have an impact on people's health. We don't have any locus of management

Health committee  The health authorities across the country have different scopes and responsibilities. Some have a lot more than others. We can't forget that in the United Kingdom there is an actual health service organization. We have payment systems that allow us to access health services. We h

Health committee  No. We're a very small agency. You talk about the $122 million in the institute and the agency; our total budget is just over $10 million. We work much more at the nexus of policy and delivery with the provinces, with the health institutions, regions, etc., working on the way in