Essay on "Canada Healthcare"

Essay 10 pages (3855 words) Sources: 6 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

In spite of the available risk, a research on the costs and quality of contracted-out elective services, in part due to the fact monitoring systems tend to be seldom in place. It becomes of significance to keep in mind that contracting with private providers will not always be synonymous with bringing the free market into health care.

The Canada government can find it possible to introduce market forces, especially competition among providers, while not having any form of private ownership. The government can also intervene in turning the private capacity into reduced wait times. Private companies will not likely to brave high the markets of healthcare entry and exit costs not until they are offered a guaranteed revenue stream, which always is supposed to come from the government. The government might even go to the extent of actively direct patients to the private service. In the case of English pilot project where the government was involved in buying the capacity from new independent, which was a private sector, long waiting patients were invited by the coordinator to have surgery in this place. Because of that, surgical activities rise while wait time went down. Although after the government subsequently paid for a more independent centre, such frequent failed to attract enough patients who were to use their capacity, (MacLeod H, Hudson A, Kramer S. et al., 2009). Amazingly, the response of the government was to fund yet additional centre having hope that they were to spur competition, but not to introduce a coordinator. Lastly, careful monitoring and tight contracts tend to be essential way of ensuring that a company genuinely meets the quality standards and do not be involved in poaching staff from the public system. Therefore, in case the government has the willingness of doing so, then opting to buy some types of private capacity could be a viable option of meeting a shortfall in treatment volumes. On the other hand the report of OECD indicated that, ranging from medium to long-term; it could be cheaper to expand activity by expanding public capacity.

Encouraging private capacity that is privately financed.

Even though public spending has a dominant role in Canada as well as other countries, they as well happen to have a role in private health insurance. While Canada allows complementary / supplementary private health insurance that covers fee and services that have not been covered by public insurance, some other countries have feature primary/substitute private health insurance which include either everybody posses private insurance or a section of the patients posses public while others private, but not having all of them. The ongoing debate is on whether private health insurance is capable of reducing waits is more concerns duplicate private health insurance, (Ciampolini J, Hubble MJ., 2005). Sometimes private health insurance is wrongly classified to be a demand-side strategy. It actually not intends to lower the total demand from the public to the private sector. In case our imagination put the nationwide treatment to remain the same, moving around demand can never possibly lower the population waits. What is assumed towards private health insurance promotion tends to be the idea that the supply of care will not remain the same. It is rather anticipated that in case more patients are capable of paying their own treatment, then there will be a rise in supply of private treatment, as well as more treatment to go around. Therefore it will be more accurate to describe private health insurance to be a supply-side strategy. Some of the cross-sectional studies are to the opinion that duplicate, in case anything duplicate private health insurance then it has to be associated with longer wait times.

This has been evidenced in Australia where they had a markedly shorter wait times, the reason behind it was private sector capacity. They had an active private hospital sector that had a contribution to the general capacity. They as well possessed a greater supply in terms of specialist physicians, which is a type of capacity that cannot be created by private sector.

Another problem of privately financed treatment consuming public resources is also experienced. Most of the countries tend to give their physicians the opportunity of practicing in both the private and public sector; hence they earn higher payments at the end. Such arrangement makes physicians have an obvious incentive of devoting their hours to private patients and they go to the extend of keeping their public waiting list long so that they may have no choice but to choose to attend private practice. This can be revealed by the nation of Australia in terms of promoting of private health insurance as a strategy of wait-reduction. In 1984, Australia introduced a universal public insurance, though they maintained a thriving market for duplicate private health insurance. By 1990s this promotion of citizens with private health insurance failed. In fact majority of Australians seemed to be contented with the use of public system, and they never considered private health insurance to be a good value for money not unless they looked forward for a significant health needs.

As much as there was a continued expansion of the treatment activity, private health companies were caught in the lose end of their revenue due to insuring sicker patients. However, later the government introduced an initiative of measure that was to encourage uptake of private health insurance. The argument of the government was that bolstering private health insurance was capable of reducing pressure on public system that was to reduce wait lists / time for public care. In the duration of 1999 to 2001, the Australians proportion with private health insurance had risen from 31 to 45% as well as the increase in private treatment went up. An average significance in the decrease of public wait time or list was as well realized.

Why will one find that the increase in private health insurance will fail to reduce pressure on the public systems? According to researches, the absorbed new patients and services by private health insurance is never a great source of pressure as such. The idea was that the growth within the privately financed activity was involving younger, patients who are of lower risk and requires shorter, higher profit, less complex procedures, such as day surgery, leaving all the labor intensive as well as treatment costs to the hand of the public system. Apart from shifting the demands from the public to private sector, this coming up of the private health insurance could bring up new demands especially for the services that tended to be profitable for private hospitals.

One of the major criticisms of private health insurance is because of its regressive form of funding. Since contributions tend not to be income adjusted, the rich becomes more likely of affording private insurance, and any other applicable co-payments. Looking at it in terms of equality perspective, to decide to go for private financing can be of justification in case it as well of benefit to patients who are relying on the public system, (McGowan T., 2003). It is not automatically that private financing will translate to be of greater capacity, and even if it becomes so, there could be failure of deploying the capacity in a manner that brings down the wait list. In addition any kind of new supply will always be distributed in terms of ability to pay, but not in terms of clinical need. For example, in other nations like Australia, more than a half the elective surgeries are recently private financed, and the elective surgery rate increases from socioeconomic advantage which is the opposite someone can expect in case treatment have been distributed as per the need. Promotion of private health insurance therefore stand to be an inequitable, indirect and proves to be an expensive method of increasing the supply of the treatment; yet it can as well be attained just with the same efficiency using other ways.

It is of great importance to redesign healthcare delivery in Canada for the reason of making the most out of existing capacity. Researches have indicated that inefficiencies, for example unnecessary steps, complex booking processes, avoidable delays, poor use of human resources as well as traffic jams, tend to be some of the factors that bound within the health care, and because of them, they are capable of creating long queues even if there is existing capacity that can meet the demand. Some of the ways to approach such problems may be through streamlining the patients' journey, pooling wait lists, consolidating services, maximizing scope of practice of professionals within healthcare, (Rachlis MM., 2005). Nevertheless, researchers have failed to come out with a high quality research based on the effectiveness of redesigning initiatives; this is in exception of some clear-cut interventions like promoting day surgery. It does not necessarily need… READ MORE

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