Funding of Universal Health Care Coverage: Is it still possible in next Future: Canada Example

Year 2022, Volume: 8 Issue: 2, 33 - 38, 15.08.2022

Ayşegül Kaptanoğlu

Abstract

After the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak takes its course in World, financial pressure mounts on all levels of government across the country, cost-sharing of medical and hospital care covered by the public plan health insurance has once again become a very big conflict.

Following the Canadian constitution in 1867, the door is opened to a national health insurance plan. Succeeding document indicates that the monitoring and delivery of health services is a provincial and territorial responsibility. The provinces have therefore, at different rates, implemented their own public health insurance plans. Government of Saskatchewan got the ball rolling, establishing a provincial universal public hospital insurance plan in 1947 and a provincial universal health insurance plan in 1962. Due to its constitutional reality, the country has 13 relatively distinct health care systems, one for each province and territory. However, these systems have much in common, as they draw their fiscal and legislative origins from the same series of agreements which, since the late 1950s, have defined the terms of cost sharing between the Government of Canada and the provincial governments. and territorial.

This article analyze historical federal government cost shares shows a difference of about $20 billion in current funding depending on whether tax points transferred in 1977 are considered, and results ranging from a surplus of some $15 billion to a deficit of some $23 billion if only the transfer payment is observed.

Keywords

Universal Medicare, Uncertain Future, Funding

References

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