Canadian health-care spending to top $180B (CBC)

[Drew Wilson]

Health-care spending in Canada is expected to reach $183.1 billion this year, up more than five per cent from last year, according to a report released on Thursday.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information's annual report on national health spending forecast an increase of $241 per person, raising total expenditures to an estimated $5,452 this year.

Health spending has risen since 2008 by more than five per cent, or an estimated $9.5 billion, before inflation.

The growth rate is in line with increases over the last seven years, said Chris Kuchciak, CIHI's manager of health expenditures in Ottawa.

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My favorite part of the article isn't in the article itself. It's the 3 or 4 links around it that direct readers to Swine Flu or H1N1 stories. Meanwhile, the article makes absolutely no mention of if the increase in spending has anything to do with the millions of doses the government is buying for swine flu. I can't imagine some 10 million vaccinations would be given free to the health care system.

[mountain_rage]

Last year I did a 80 page project on how RFID chips could help improve efficiency in Canadian hospitals. Its amazing how pathetic the logistics in our hospitals is, and how much improvement RFID could bring. The good news is Ontario has started implementing RFID in their hospitals as a pilot project for Canada. If we get to the point of a widespread implementation, the data gathered, and logistical improvements would decrease wait times, and lower costs significantly. There are good things coming, hopefully the government doesn't screw it all up.

Another area I would like to see improved is standardizing hospital structures in Canada. All new buildings should be built around a standard building plan, country wide. This would remove the need to train staff from different regions on the layout of a hospital, remove the cost of designing new hospitals every time they need to be built, and cut the cost of researching how to implement new technologies in hospitals. One hospital could test it, if successful the exact same roll out could be applied to all hospitals.

It is amazing how poorly our health care system is run. Yet at the same time its still cheaper, and saves more lives than the American system, so I still would not trade it in, but I do want it to be fixed.