Canada's Health Care System

Canada’s health care system “can be described as a publicly-funded, privately-provided, universal, comprehensive, affordable, single-payer, provincially administered national health care system” (Bernard, 1992, p.103). Health care in Canada is provincial responsibility, with the Canada Health act being a federal legislation (Bernard, 1992, p. 102). Federal budget cuts, has caused various problems within Medicare such as increased waiting times and lack of new technology. Another problem with Medicare is that The Canada Heath Act does not cover expenditures for prescriptions drugs. All these issue has caused individuals to suggest making Medicare privatized. Although, Canada’s health care system consists of shortcomings, our universal comprehensive health care system is not crisis. The following paper will discuss how the federal-provincial relations and media have aided to these problems. Lastly, throughout the paper intergovernmental solutions to these issues will be presented.

The 1867 Constitution Act did not assign responsibility for health care to either provincial or federal governments, but it did assign the responsibility of hospitals towards provinces, thus health care in Canada has become under provincial jurisdiction (Stamler, & Yiu, 2005 p.17). In addition, “the Canadian Constitution has an equalization clause requiring provinces to provide “reasonable comparable levels of public service for reasonably comparable levels of taxation” (Stamler, & Yiu , 2005 p. 17). Despite it being under provincial jurisdiction, the federal government has been involved in funding and making sure the services are available. Since territorial and provincial wealth differs, the federal government’s role is to equalize services across provinces. The federal government does this two ways: “first by contributing money (in effect, transferring money from wealthier to poorer provinces), and second, by stipulating specific conditions that provinces must meet in order to

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