Bringing about a higher level of transparency and accountability in provincial and federal governments to help protect taxpayers from abuse
When you read about Canadians coerced into paying thousands of dollars for quicker access to health-care services that should be available to them at no cost in the publicly funded health system, it is infuriating.
It feels downright un-Canadian.
But, more than anything, the exposé of queue-jumping and double-dipping by The Globe and Mail’s Kathy Tomlinson speaks to the impotence of the regulatory regime.
If you live in the United States, you can easily find out if your doctor receives payments from drug companies. Ditto if you live in Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Denmark and many other European countries.
But not Canada.
This country is seen as an international “laggard” when it comes to transparency about financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and physicians.
Read more at thestar.com
BOISE — A Fruitland woman will serve five years in prison for her role in health-care fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Cherie R. Dillon, 62, of Fruitland, was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release for health-care fraud and aggravated identity theft, Acting U.S. Attorney Rafael Gonzalez announced in a news release.
Read more at argusobserver.com
Personal care home employee raised alarm bells in 2011 about financial mismanagement.
A whistleblower who sounded the alarm about financial mismanagement, nepotism and fraud at a West St. Paul personal care home is suing the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and three lawyers after the person’s identity was allegedly revealed in court documents.
Read more at cbc.ca
With thousands of people on waiting lists for long-term care beds in this region, you might expect a new long-term care home in Ottawa to bring some relief.
But the Ontario government’s move to approve a new facility in the city’s west end without adding a single new bed to the mix is drawing criticism and frustration from doctors. It offers a glimpse, they say, into how the province is failing the elderly and not dealing with a growing health-care crisis.
Read more at ottawacitizen.com
An inquest into the death of a youth in custody will be held later this month in Saskatoon.
Timothy Unger was a resident at Kilburn Hall Youth Centre, a secure custody youth facility in Saskatoon, when he died on July 30, 2015. In the early morning hours he was taken to Royal University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Read more at cbc.ca
For more than two decades, the Fraser Institute has annually surveyed specialist physicians across Canada to estimate how long patients wait for treatment. Our latest survey found that in 2016, overall, patients were waiting 20 weeks between referral from a family doctor to treatment — the longest wait in our survey’s history and 115 per cent longer than in 1993.
While the intervening years have seen increased measurement and acknowledgment of wait times in Canada, they also produced an unhealthy acceptance of the problem — as though wait times are the necessary price for universal health care. Like the anecdote of the frog in the pot of cold water, which is slowly brought to a boil without the frog’s knowledge or immediate discomfort, the slow but fairly consistent annual lengthening of wait times for treatment has made us sometimes forget that our system fails to deliver timely access to care and real people suffer as a result.
Read more at huffingtonpost.ca
Health care costs the public sector about $160 billion a year in Canada, a higher per capita cost than most industrialized nations. Yet Canadians are not markedly healthier, nor do we receive better care.
The Commonwealth Fund has ranked Canada 10th out of 11 developed nations for the efficiency of our healthcare system (only the United States was worse). We came at or close to the bottom in access to care, timeliness of care and overall quality of care, and didn’t rank in the top three in any of the metrics reviewed.
Maybe our health care system isn’t as great as we like to think it is. How can Canadian health care move to the front of the pack?
Read more at thestar.com
Demand for mental health care at universities across Canada, including UBC, is growing according to a recent investigation by the Toronto Star and Ryerson School of Journalism.
But some students say the university’s services aren’t enough.
Despite that, the report revealed that many Canadian universities have significantly increased mental health funding, although some are struggling to meet growing the demand.
Cheryl Washburn, director of counselling services at UBC, said in an email that from the 2014-2015 school year to the 2015-2016 school year, funding for counselling services has gone up by over 30 per cent.
Read more at cbc.ca
The state of Ohio is taking five major opioid manufacturers to task—for their alleged role in escalating the epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose.
The companies named in the lawsuit, filed Wednesday (May 31), are Purdue Pharma, Janssen Pharmaceuticals (a unit of Johnson & Johnson), a unit of Endo International Plc, Cephalon (a unit of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries), and Allergan Plc.
Attorney General Mike DeWine, who filed the lawsuit in Ross County, said the bulk of the opioid crisis can be blamed on the pharmaceutical companies, who are accused of marketing and promoting powerful opioid meds like OxyContin and Percocet, in addition to “overstating their benefits and trivializing their potential addictive qualities,” according to Reuters.
Read more at thefix.com