It will take more than money to fix health care: Canadian Medical Association

The CMA said the deal former prime minister Paul Martin struck in 2004 came in at a distant second to the latest Liberal health accord in terms of the total money spent on health care, which amounted to about $12.3 billion per year.

The analysis also looked at whether such funding agreements have made a difference in the past.

“I don’t think we do a great job in health care looking backwards and understanding our history of how we got here, because the crises are often so, so pressing,” said association president Dr. Alika Lafontaine, an anesthesiologist in Grande Prairie, Alta.

He said big investments do seem to have made a difference, but progress backslid when parties stopped working together. The $1 billion former prime minister Stephen Harper put toward lowering wait times in 2007 was a key example, he said.

“For a period of time, I think health care felt like it was getting a lot better,” Lafontaine said of the accord Harper struck with provinces at the time.

The deal saw provinces and territories guarantee lower wait times for a treatment of their choosing, ranging from cancer care to cataract surgeries.

He said the CMA’s analysis shows that large investments in health care can make a difference, but only if the parties keep working together long-term.

“The reason why we’re in today’s problems is because we didn’t actually work together long enough and deep enough to fix the problems. We partially fixed them, and then we got up and we walked away,” he said.

Now, he said, the problems faced by the health-care workforce are much more serious, and it will take political will and co-operation to overcome them.

He said he expects benchmarks will be set to measure the progress made with the latest health deal between the federal and provincial governments.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 20, 2022.

Laura Osman, The Canadian Press

by The Canadian Press

It will take more than money to fix health care: Canadian Medical Association

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