[EQ] Canadian medicare and the global health care bazaar

Canadian medicare and the global health care bazaar

 

Leigh Turner is associate professor and William Dawson Scholar at the Biomedical Ethics Unit and the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University. This article was written while he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Comparative Program on Health and Society at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies

POLICY OPTIONS- Montreal, Quebec, Canada- September 2007
Institute for Research on Public Policy - IRPP

 

Available online PDF [5p.] at:  http://www.irpp.org/po/archive/sep07/turner.pdf

 

“….In a world where inexpensive air travel, low cost telecommunications and digitized patient records make traveling for health care increasingly easy,
there is now a global health care marketplace..

The author reviews the scattered evidence regarding these new international health options, notably the rapid emergence of medical tourism companies across

Canada. Unfortunately, says Turner, “politicians and health policy-makers pay surprisingly little attention to the ready availability of health care in other

countries,” and no one knows precisely how many Canadians travel abroad specifically for this reason. But given the implications for our universal health

care system and our health, he argues that better documentation and investigation of health-related travel outside Canada will be an important part of improving public policy in this field…..”

 

As globalization changes the delivery of health care, researchers will need to better understand the movement of patients across provincial and national borders.

The lack of research on the experiences of Canadians buying treatment in the global health care bazaar is perhaps connected to the relatively modest number of Canadians traveling beyond Canada’s borders for health care. It is also possible that the purchase of treatment abroad by wealthy and middle-class Canadians

poses a direct challenge to Canada’s egalitarian ethos and there is widespread reluctance to acknowledge with candor the ease with which upper-income Canadians can escape the queues in which lower-income Canadians wait for care…..”

 

 

 

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