The Canadian Medical Association’s recommendations arose out of surveys, town halls and focus groups with more than 10,000 people who were asked how best to balance public and private health care.
Canada should ban user fees for primary care and create a publicly funded “safety valve” that would force provincial governments to pay for care in other jurisdictions if waiting times become dangerously long, according to the organization that represents doctors across the country.
The CMA’s 22 recommendations arose out of surveys, town halls and focus groups with more than 10,000 people who were asked how best to balance public and private health care. The main take-away was that medical care should continue to be distributed based on patients’ needs, not their financial resources, said Kathleen Ross, a British Columbia family physician and co-president of the CMA.
The CMA paper notes that a national shortage of family doctors has led to an increase in for-profit companies offering virtual primary care. Some of those services are covered by provincial health insurance and others are not. The CMA agrees in its new draft policy that governments should, “enforce the Canada Health Act prohibition against user fees by clamping down on jurisdictions that allow the charging of membership fees, user fees or bundled payments.”
The physicians’ group concluded that private insurance for care covered by the Canada Health Act should remain outlawed or severely restricted. Instead, the CMA recommends that if governments can’t meet clinically approved waiting times, they should pay to send patients to other provinces or countries for care, as B.C. began doing last year when it couldn’t provide timely radiation therapy.
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