A first look at the numbers

It’s often stated that, back in the first few years of Medicare, really meaning the early to mid ’70s, about one-third of health spending in Canada was privately funded; that in the next few years the share of private funding in total spending fell to the low twenties and that in recent years the private share has risen again to roughly the level it was when Medicare was brought in. [...] One of the greatest barriers to reform of the Canadian health care system is the notion that the government pays for everything. [...] The numbers haven’t been adjusted for the increase in the cost of health care, just for the increase in the Consumer Price Index, so they shouldn’t be taken as representing increases in quantity of health care services – even after the inflation adjustment they are expenditure series. [...] The question of how increases in spending are distributed between increases in quantity of care and increases in the price of care is a separate issue. [...] The drop in public spending on health care in the early ’90s was strictly the result of the very casual approach that government had taken to the funding of our health care system in the two preceding decades.