Canada Health Transfer money shouldn’t have strings attached: Fraser Institute

The federal government should take a page out of Chretien’s welfare reform of the 90s to fix the healthcare system, according to a new report by the Fraser Institute.

It says the same escalating costs that faced the welfare system under Prime Minister Jean Chretien are plaguing the country’s wait times now.

Ben Eisen, the study’s co-author, says the Canada Health Transfer comes with too many strings.

“There’s a number of rules that the provinces need to comply with in order to receive those funds, and those rules make it difficult for the province to innovate in certain ways, and pursue even reforms that have proven successful in other European countries that have very high performing universal health care systems,” he said.

In 1995, Chretien reduced federal welfare transfers, while also eliminating rules surrounding accepting the cash.

Eisen says policymakers should be giving provinces more flexibility in financing and services in healthcare, so they would be able to use a system like co-pay.

“In which users in the point of the use of (the) healthcare system, pay some small portion of the costs, with of course exemptions and deductions for low-income people, to make sure that people get the care that they need, and what that does is it encourages responsible use of health system resources,” he said. “And there’s a lot of evidence that it helps reduce costs and improve outcomes.”

The study says healthcare costs consumed more than 40 per cent of provincial budgets on average in 2015, and that number is expected to rise to more than 47 per cent by 2030.