The Prime Minister said: "The Conservative agenda is no longer hidden, it is no federal role in health care, it is no Canada Health Act, it is no one saying no to the privatization of health care.''
The report has one major premise. Canadians need more freedom of choice in their lives. The concept promotes, greater use of private insurance to cover the costs associated with health care, incentives for those who take care of themselves, and a guarantee of universal access.
Here are the main recommendations..
- Remove jurisdictional roadblocks to better health care for patients by subsubstantially amending or replacing the Canada Health Act and transferring responsibility for health-care delivery and financing, including federal tax points, entirely to the provinces. Make Freedom of Choice a fundamental principle of any future health-care legislation.
- Expand health-care facilities and cut waiting times by removing all federal restrictions that prevent provincial governments from using private capital, non-governmental providers, and market-based pricing mechanisms in the development of health-care facilities and the delivery of health-care services to Canadians.
- Focus federal support for health care in the areas where it can do the most good: health-care science and research, no-strings-attached equalization payments to have-not provinces to enable them to meet national standards, and the collection and dissemination to health-care users of information on the performance of the Canadian health-care system including the portability of benefits between provinces.
- Reduce the federal personal income-tax rate from 6% to 5% for the lowlowest bracket, eliminate the next two brackets, and reduce the top rate from 29% to 25%. The reduction and elimination of these brackets would equal the current federal spending on health care and allow the provinces exexpanded tax room to finance health care. The equalization forformula will provide additional revenues to those lower income provinces for which a “tax point” is worth less than for higher income provinces.
What will the adoption of these measures mean to you and your family in practical terms? Most importantly, you and your family will be fully insured against catastrophic illness, just as you are now, and will have continued access to all medically necessary services regardless of ability to pay. These features of our current system will not only be reretained. They will be made far more sustainable. But in addition, you will have more choice in health-care services resulting in shorter waiting times, access to the latest medical technology, and better care.
In most provinces, when you are sick you will still most likely enter the health-care system through the door to a doctor’s office, clinic, or a hospital that is part of the public health-care system. But if your needs cannot be attended to promptly or satisfactorily, you will have the option of being referred to another facility offering equivalent or more specialized care where you can be treated sooner, and that facility, while licensed by the government, may well be financed and operated by a qualified private operator.
If the services provided by the private facility are core services covered by your provincial health-care insurance plan, upon presentation of your Health Care Card the cost of your treatment will be covered by the province in accordance with the same fee schedule used at publicly run facilities. If the services you require or desire are not covered by your provincial health-care insurance plan, they may be paid for directly or through any private supplementary health-care insurance plan (which is the case now).
Source
Canada Strong and Free
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