The BC Legislature’s Select Standing Committee on Health is currently investigating the sustainability of BC’s health care system (with a focus on demographic / aging trends), and asked for written submissions of peer-reviewed studies on the subject. Here’s what I just submitted: Submission to the BC Legislature’s Select Standing Committee on Health From: Seth Klein, [...]
Entries Tagged as 'health care costs'
Making health care funding sustainable
January 13th, 2012 · Seth Klein · Comments Off · Health care
Tags: budget·health care costs
The End of the H1N1 Pandemic
August 23rd, 2010 · Alan Cassels · 1 Comment · Health care
The world spent billions on medication and vaccine stockpiles because the World Health Organization cried wolf. If the WHO cannot cleanse its ties to the industrialists hungry for profits in exaggerating the severity of disease in order to sell treatments, why should we ever again listen to anything they say?
Tags: health care costs
Cholesterol drugs don’t help the healthy
August 12th, 2010 · Alan Cassels · 1 Comment · Health care
I have said this before and this recent research begs me to say this again: Someday we will look back on society’s zeal for checking and chemically altering our blood cholesterol in the same way we now regard blood letting and purging: A medical barbarity that good science cannot support.
Tags: health care costs
Teeny Budget factoid
September 3rd, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · 2 Comments · Economy, Privatization, P3s & public services, Provincial budget & finance
It appears when it comes to the heavy lifting of cutting spending in BC, not all public agencies are equal. The February Budget documents stated that: To ensure that health services are protected in the current economic environment, the Ministry of Health Services and health authorities will be required to achieve efficiencies and administrative savings [...]
A Framework for Enhancing Home Support in BC
May 4th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · Comments Off · Health care
Home support is an important element of the broader home and community care system, which unfortunately tends to get overlooked in many health care discussions. Home support serves an important dual purpose: it improves the quality of life of vulnerable citizens by allowing them to continue living independently in their own homes and it enables [...]
Tags: baby boomers·health care costs·home and community care·home support·seniors
Seniors' care concerns should be taken seriously in this election
May 1st, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · Comments Off · Health care
Access to residential care beds for seniors was dubbed “an election hotspot” by CTV early last week, and for good reasons. The party that forms government after May’s election will have to deal with the pressures that the aging population would put on the already strained system of seniors’ care in BC. Fundamentally, providing an [...]
Tags: accountability·health care costs·home and community care·hospital·Jeremy Tate·Liberals·Marcy Cohen·NDP·platform·residential care·seniors
Docs call for more attention to addiction
April 8th, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · Comments Off · Health care, Housing & homelessness
The BC Medical Association released an important report at the end of March. The Vancouver Sun gave it good coverage, but overall it didn’t get the attention it deserved. Stepping Forward: Improving Addiction Care in BC raises a lot of issues worth talking about in an election. The report estimates there are 400,000 British Columbians [...]
Tags: addiction·health care costs
Contracting Out: Enough to make you sick
March 21st, 2009 · Colleen Fuller · Comments Off · Health care
There is now an accumulation of evidence, both international and domestic, that contracting out is good — but only if you happen to own shares in MDS, Sodexho, LifeLabs, Compass, Aramark or any number of other piggybackers. Unfortunately, if you are merely a patient, taxpayer and/or hospital worker you are probably getting sicker, paying more [...]
The Lawsuit
March 4th, 2009 · Colleen Fuller · Comments Off · Health care
The Lawsuit A couple of weeks ago I wrote that Brian Day and his followers had launched a lawsuit against the province, alleging that, “in contravention of the value of individual choice,” the Medicare Protection Act restricts or prohibits patients from “accessing the private health care of their choice”. Day & Co. brazenly admit in [...]
The Budget: A Determinant of Health
February 19th, 2009 · Colleen Fuller · Comments Off · Health care
I know this budget is supposed to be good news for health, but I want to argue here that the exact opposite is true. We’ve had a lot of budgets like this in B.C., so this one is in keeping with its right wing predecessors. During the 1980s, for example, the never-ending Social Credit government [...]
Tags: budget·David Gordon·health care costs·living wage·poverty·public sector·service cuts·Social Credit
