Tag Archives: health spending
The Health Care Cost Curve: Bending if Necessary but not Necessarily Bending?
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has put out their 2013 National Health Expenditure Report and the big story seems to be that the numbers show that public sector health care costs in Canada are declining. Real per capita public sector health care spending (in 1997 dollars and I used the Health Care Implicit […]
Are More Physicians Preferred to Less?
Physician spending has been highlighted as one of the fastest growing expenditure categories in Canadian health care spending. The increase in supply of physicians, rising fees and the increasing utilization of health care per capita are recognized as important and intertwined factors driving expenditure for physician services. Despite perceptions of a shortage of physicians, the […]
Explaining the Health Spending Slowdown
Canadian Institute for Health Information numbers show that there is a moderation in health expenditure growth underway. From a growth rate of 6.1 percent in 2010, the CIHI estimates growth in total nominal health spending of 3.9 percent in 2011 and 3.4 percent in 2012. Over the same period, the health expenditure to GDP ratio […]
Value for Money in Health
The Conference Board is having a Summit on Sustainable Health and Health Care October 30th and 31st in Toronto featuring a plethora of media, industry, health service and academic experts who will focus on the need to refocus the health system “from treating acute illness to preventing and managing chronic disease so governments, healthcare leaders […]
Health Spending Update: Into the 21st Century
The OECD released its Health Data 2012 statistics several months ago and they are certainly worth a glance given that rising health spending is still a big international policy issue, and the capacity to pay has taken a recessionary hit during the first decade of the 21st century.
Is the Health Care Cost Curve In Canada Finally Bending?
While public health care spending in Canada has been growing, what has not received a lot of attention is that after adjusting for inflation and population, growth rates of real per capita public health spending in Canada have actually been declining.
Is a Constitutional Challenge Public Health Care’s Next Arena?
Many Canadians believe that the Canada Health Act is the bulwark that is supposed to be protecting public health care and that it should ensure comparable levels of coverage across the country. Yet, if one examines per capita provincial government health spending, the evidence shows that there are major differences.
Dealing with the Baby Boom: You Only Die Once
It has been a week of immersion in health economics for me. Last Friday, we had Herb Emery from Calgary visiting Lakehead and he gave a seminar presentation on generational balance and public health care spending in Canada. I also just got back from a workshop on health expenditure forecasting and along with last Friday’s […]
Stein’s Law and Canadian Health Spending
Health economist Uwe Reinhardt in a recent Economix Blog posting noted the recent rates of U.S. health spending growth for 2009 and 2010 reported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were marked as the lowest rate in the 51-year history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts. Indeed, the growth rate for 2009 was […]
Health Outcomes & Health Financing: An Example
I finally got around to looking at the OECD Health Data release for 2011 and as is my habit, I spend some time looking at the overview reports and charts as well as playing around with some of the data. The first chart provided by the OECD that I want to draw your attention to […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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