For Solutions on Health Care, look to Europe, not { to Canada } (287 hits)
The Canadian health-care system is opaque, unconcerned with patient satisfaction and, of course, has lengthy waiting times for medical services as a defining feature. Canadians are aware of these problems but many accept them as the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of universal coverage; that's because they believe our model is better than what many posit as the only alternative, a supposedly wholly private American-style system that leaves millions uninsured and without access to quality care.
But the Canada-U.S. comparison is stale and unhelpful. A better one is to compare Canada with Europe. There, universal coverage is achieved through a publicly-funded system but without the inefficiencies and delays that plague Canadian health care. The gap between the quality of health care enjoyed by most Europeans and that received by Canadians is strikingly large. A recent Frontier Centre study compares Canada with European countries on a wide variety of indicators of health care quality and ranks Canada 23rd out of the 32 nations surveyed.
One critical difference between European health-care systems and Canada's is that Europeans rarely endure the stressful and often painful waiting periods with which Canadian patients are all too familiar.So how do they do it? European governments embrace delivery models that foster competition between insurers and providers within a universal publicly funded system, and which by their design reward excellence among health-care institutions and professionals.
In Sweden, for example, hospitals compete for customers and are paid (by the government) a per-treatment fee for each different service provided. This approach has led to dramatic increases in hospital productivity and efficiency since its introduction in the early 1990s; it has provided a powerful incentive for hospitals to focus on the needs of health-care consumers.
