This study explores the policy options a provincial government might consider in extending health care coverage to the purchase of prescription drugs and dental care. It examines the major public policy objectives involved, such as spreading risk, redistributing wealth, and reducing the barriers to care, and evaluates alternative programs in terms of their costs and efficiency as well as their realization of the basic social objectives of health care. Using varied statistics, some drawn fr...

Health issues have long occupied top headlines in Canadian media, and no journalist has written on public health with more authority or for as many years as André Picard. Matters of Life and Death collects Picard's most compelling columns, covering a broad range of topics including Canada's right-to-die law, the true risks of the Zika virus, the financial challenges of a publicly funded health system, appalling health conditions in First Nations communities, the legalization of ma...

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.Would it be possible to provide people with a basic income as a right? The idea has a long history. This book draws on two pilot schemes conducted in the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh, in which thousands of men, women and children were provided with an unconditional monthly cash payment. In a context in which the Indian government at nationa...

The Oxford Handbook of Health Economics provides an accessible and authoritative guide to health economics, intended for scholars and students in the field, as well as those in adjacent disciplines including health policy and clinical medicine. The chapters stress the direct impact of health economics reasoning on policy and practice, offering readers an introduction to the potential reach of the discipline. Contributions come from internationally-recognized leaders in health econ...

A Healthy Society, Updated and Expanded Edition, is one doctor’s vision for a new approach to politics – and a new approach to building a healthier world. Drawing on his experiences as a family physician, Dr. Meili argues that health delivery too often focuses on treatment of immediate causes and ignores more fundamental conditions that lead to poor health. The social determinants of health – income, education, employment, housing, the wider environment, and social supports – have...

The widespread condemnation of drastic price increases on life-saving drugs highlights our growing dependency on and vulnerability to international pharmaceutical conglomerates. However, aren’t the interests of the public supposed to supersede the pursuit of private profit?In his new work, Private Profits versus Public Policy, Joel Lexchin addresses this question as he examines how public policy with respect to the pharmaceutical industry has evolved in Canada over the pas...

In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt created America's first domestic national service program: the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). As part of this program-the largest and most highly esteemed of its kind-nearly three million unemployed men worked to rehabilitate, protect, and build the nation's natural resources. It demonstrated what citizens and government could accomplish together. Yet despite its success, the CCC was short lived. While more controversial programs such as Presiden...

An Obamacare book like no other, Obamacare: Healthcare Apocalypse not only lays out all of the core components of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but also provides a detailed analysis of the long-term impacts of this massive federal intrusion into healthcare.Whether by intentional design or as the byproduct of bad law, Obamacare will literally and figuratively tax the current, and effective, predominantly employment-based third-party payor system to the breaking poi...

Canada has been among the world leaders in recognizing the multiple factors that impact health. Focusing on Canada’s health care system, Raisa B. Deber provides brief descriptions of some key facts and concepts necessary to understand health care policy in Canada and place it in an international context.An accessible guide, Treating Health Care unpacks key concepts to provide informed discussions that help us understand and diagnose Canada’s health care system and to clari...

The U.S. healthcare system is in critical condition--but this should come as a surprise to no one. Yet until now the solutions proposed have been unworkable, pie-in-the-sky plans that have had little chance of becoming law and even less of succeeding. In Code Red, David Dranove, one of the nation's leading experts on the economics of healthcare, proposes a set of feasible solutions that address access, efficiency, and quality.Dranove offers pragmatic remedies, some of them...

Canada is the only OECD country that has universal, comprehensive public hospital and medical insurance but lacks equivalent pharmaceutical coverage. In Ideas and the Pace of Change, Katherine Boothe explains the reasons for this unique situation. Using archival, interview, and polling data, Boothe compares the policy histories of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia in order to understand why Canada followed a different path on pharmaceutical insurance.Boothe argues ...

Describes developments in healthcare systems over nearly four decades. Combining cross-sectional studies on healthcare financing, provision and policy values with in-depth country studies of Britain, Germany and the USA, this volume is a thorough examination of the convergence toward hybrid forms of healthcare systems.