Condition Critical: Canada’s Health-Care System

Canada’s health care ranks with the finest in the world. Yet Canadians face crowded hospitals, steadily decreasing government health-care budgets, insufficent care for a rapidly aging population, inadequate monitoring of drugs and medical devices marketed in this country, bitter feeling between doctors and politicians, and admitted difficulties in dealing with epidemics like AIDS. And the public continues to demand access to new and expensive technologies, like reproductive science and liver transplants. What has happened to the dream of good universal health care for Canadians? To answer that question, medical journalist Nicholas Regush has interviewed hundreds of people involved in the health field – doctors, nurses, researchers, health economists, bioethics, hospital and nursing-home administrators, social workers, scientists, politicians, bureaucrats, patients, inventors, entrepreneurs, and pharmaceutical company executives. Their views are enlightening, worrying, and varied. But all agree on the necessity of setting priorities. Drawing on more than fifteen years as a medical observer, Regush also prescribes solutions that could mark the turning-point in the state of Canada’s health-care system.