EDITORIAL: It's time to fix our health care

In 2023, the first order of business for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the premiers should be fixing Canada’s beleaguered health-care system.

Right now, they’re not even talking to each other.

The premiers are demanding more federal funding for the largest single expenditure in their budgets, typically around 40% of all provincial spending.

Trudeau says he won’t meet with the premiers until they agree to performance goals on how the money is spent.

This impasse is harming Canadians.

Canada’s health-care system does need more investment — the one thing on which Trudeau and the premiers agree.

The pandemic fully exposed long-term deficiencies in Canada’s health-care system, including high costs with unacceptably long wait limes for treatment and mediocre outcomes, compared to similar countries with universal health-care systems.

The reality is the template for health-care spending in Canada is broken.

In that context, it’s not unreasonable for the prime minister and the federal government to want to know how federal money to improve health care is going to be spent by the provinces.

That should be happening already, just as the provinces should be auditing their own health-care spending to make sure it’s achieving the desired results as efficiently as possible.

Finally, given that the template for health-care funding is broken, we need to find new ways of paying for and delivering health care.

That will require new thinking and new ways of doing things by both the federal and provincial governments.

Many developed countries with universal health-care systems comparable to our own, but with more efficient spending and better outcomes — excluding the United States which doesn’t have universal health care — have co-payment fees for patients that pay part of the costs for medically necessary care.

Provinces should also be permitted to provide health care in the most efficient ways possible, whether the provider is in the private or public sector, as long as the government is the funder of the service.

For years, federal and provincial politicians falsely assured Canadians that their “free” health care was “the best in the world.” In fact, it was never “free” and it is not, if it ever was, “the best in the world.”

It’s time to make it better.