Health care

Why incentive pay won’t fix education or health care

Oct 14, 2010
By
It turns out — surprise! — that it’s really hard to measure quality in complex social systems and that employing simplistic quantitative measures can backfire. That’s the take-home message from a recent talk by UC Berkley economist and public policy professor Jesse Rothstein who came to SFU to present his latest research on using standardized… View Article

The End of the H1N1 Pandemic

Aug 23, 2010
By
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?… View Article

Cholesterol drugs don’t help the healthy

Aug 12, 2010
By
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…. View Article

The U.K. having problems with its P3s

Jul 27, 2010
By
Britain, which led the charge for public private partnerships under both Conservative and Labour governments over the past decades, is now seeing problems with the projects. This month the new coalition government cancelled the controversial Building Schools for the Future program.  Michael Gove, the Conservative Secretary of State for Education said the P3 school program… View Article

Good news from the BC government – with a couple of caveats

Jul 10, 2010
By
The BC government’s announcement July 9th that it had signed a deal on generic drugs with the province’s drug stores is good news.  As discussed in an earlier blog, British Columbians have been paying far more than consumers in other jurisdictions for generic drugs.  Alberta, Quebec and Ontario had already taken steps to correct this… View Article

When $300,000 isn’t enough

Dec 21, 2009
By
I heard today that the Fraser Health Authority is giving its CEO Nigel Murray a $30,000 bonus on top of his $300,000 annual salary.  Put that up against the cuts the Authority is making to services for addicted youth and seniors, among others.   Remember that hospital housekeeping workers, who are the first line of defense… View Article

Healthy eating put out of reach for the poor

Dec 16, 2009
By
Remember the Premier’s “Great Golden Goal” (G3?) about healthy eating? True, we don’t  hear so much about it these days. But it was a laudable goal. Eating a healthy diet is important if we are to improve the overall health of the population, and thereby help to slow rising health care costs. And it’s particularly… View Article

Technology and the future of public health care

Dec 2, 2009
By
A couple years ago I put out a report for the CCPA that crunched the numbers on health care sustainability (BC version here). The main finding was that public health care was basically sustainable in that it could handle projected increases in population, aging and inflation as long as GDP continued to grow at a… View Article