Is Two-Tier Health Care the Future? - by Colleen M Flood & Bryan Thomas (Paperback)

About the Book

What if Canada's health-care system were to become a two-tier system? Would wait times be eliminated? Answering this question is critical given an ongoing Charter challenge in British Columbia.

Book Synopsis

Canadians are deeply worried about wait times for health care.

Entrepreneurial doctors and private clinics are bringing Charter challenges to existing laws restrictive of a two-tier system. They argue that Canada is an outlier among developed countries in limiting options to jump the queue.

This book explores whether a two-tier model is a solution. In Is Two-Tier Health Care the Future?, leading researchers explore the public and private mix in Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and Ireland. They explain the history and complexity of interactions between public and private funding of health care and the many regulations and policies found in different countries used to both inhibit and sometimes to encourage two-tier care, such as tax breaks.

This edited collection provides critical evidence on the different approaches to regulating two-tier care across different countries and what could work in Canada.

Published in English.

Review Quotes

Is Two-Tier Health Care the Future?, is the best book in years about the past, present and future of Canadian Medicare. The book, with its compelling introduction by Colleen Flood and Bryan Thomas, is well written and well edited. Unlike many edited volumes, authors have written coherent, linked, chapters on the most controversial topics in Canadian medical care. These prominently include the history of intense disputes over private and public finance of hospitals and physicians, and address how and why private finance of Canadian medical care has always been and will continue to be so controversial. The most unusual feature of Canadian health care policy--illuminated by chapters on medical finance in other rich democracies--is how judicial decision making in Medicare's past and present has become dominated by constitutional law and disputes about how much market allocation is tolerable in an egalitarian program like Canada's Medicare. How that came to be over the past few decades and what the BC Cambie Clinic case means for the future is what this serious work of scholarship provides.-- "PUO-UOP"

The most unusual feature of Canadian health care policy--illuminated by chapters on medical finance in other rich democracies--is how judicial decision making in Medicare's past and present has become dominated by constitutional law and disputes about how much market allocation is tolerable in an egalitarian program like Canada's Medicare. How that came to be over the past few decades and what the BC Cambie Clinic case means for the future is what this serious work of scholarship provides.-- "PUO-UOP"

About the Author

Vanessa Gruben B.Sc.H (Queen's), LL.B. (Ottawa), LL.M. (Columbia) is Vice Dean (Academic), an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Common Law and a member of the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics. She also leads the Ottawa Hub for Harm Reduction - a multidisciplinary forum for scholars and community organizations who work on innovative harm reduction strategies. She is also co-editor of the 5th edition of Canada's leading text on health law and policy in Canada, Canadian Health Law and Policy, co-edited with Joanna Erdman and Erin Nelson (LexisNexis, 2017). Professor Gruben teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Health Law and a seminar on Access to Health Care.