Health committee  Sure. Thank you. As I mentioned in my testimony, we've seen millions of Canadians losing their jobs during this crisis. Since the majority of people who do have drug coverage have it through private insurance through their employer, people have now lost that coverage, in additio

Health committee  Thank you for your comments. I'm glad we're in agreement on the issue of funding. I think the question was what the role would be for standards. If we just need increased funding, why would we need standards? I would say that we need to have some consistency. People across th

Health committee  Respectfully, I mentioned that the private, for-profit or public, not-for-profit is a factor in terms of providing higher quality care, and that is not simply based on the Toronto Star article that Mr. Davies cited earlier. It's based on decades of academic research. The office o

Health committee  Thank you for the question. It is a bit of a complex question because of this overlapping jurisdiction. As we have seen in other areas of health care, there is a really critical role for the federal government to play. In the Canada Health Act, we have some criteria that the pr

Health committee  That's a big question. The kinds of standards for long-term care and home care that we're calling for would be really broad principles that, as I mentioned, the provinces would be expected to meet. When it comes down to operationalizing those principles, that would most likely be

Health committee  That is the data I was alluding to that suggested for-profit facilities have higher fatality rates in their long-term care centres. An obvious example is staffing levels. Even at the best of times, when corporations are trying to increase their profits and they're accountable to

Health committee  That's a good question. We have Dr. Pat Armstrong on our board who is one of the leading experts on seniors care in Canada. She would be in a better position than I am to answer that question. She just released a book in the fall that is looking at the privatization of seniors

Health committee  To the first point, yes, as I mentioned, pharmacare would save us around $5 billion every year. We would be spending $5 billion less with a pharmacare program than we are currently spending without one. It's not a question of can we afford it; it's can we afford not to have it.

Health committee  That's right. We didn't just come up with those numbers ourselves. A report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer had some conservative estimates in it. Some people say it would even be upwards of $11 billion a year. It depends, I think, on the discounts we could get on the prescri

Health committee  Hello, everyone, and good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today. The Canadian Health Coalition has been working for over 40 years to protect and improve public health care in Canada. We are a national, non-partisan organization made up of health ca