Economic Note on Private Alternatives to Health Care Funding

Summary

The purpose of this project was to provide readers and policymakers with a comprehensive explanation of different types of medical insurances systems, such as complementary, supplementary and parallel systems. The researcher examined the possibility of introducing private health insurance in Canada, in order to demonstrate that voluntary private insurance could be an efficient way to increase health care funding in Canada, while also increasing patient control over individual medical treatments. The project sought to highlight the systems and experiences of other OECD nations, all of which allowed some form of parallel health care system.

Grant Outputs

Using Private Insurance to Finance Health Care – http://www.iedm.org/files/nov05_en.pdf

This article examines how a private parallel health insurance system could supplement the universal health care system already established in Canada. The report suggests that the existing system could be improved by allowing high earning individuals to purchase their own core and supplementary health care insurance, while continuing to pay into the universal health care system. This would not violate the existing legislation, and would alleviate demand pressure without removing any funding from the system. The report refers to the systems in other OECD countries, where certain categories of people are excluded from the public health insurance system based on their relatively higher incomes.