About Canada: Health Care

Health care is Canada’s best-loved social program–and for good reason. For more than 30 years, Canadians have enjoyed high quality health care based on need and not on ability to pay. But it is a complex system: changes proposed and those already underway can be difficult to understand and evaluate. What do ‘public’ and ‘private’ mean as they apply to our current health care system and in proposed reforms? As the boomer generation ages, will the growing number of seniors bankrupt Medicare? What do we mean by wait times and are they increasing? Who pays for drugs and how can we ensure Canadians have equitable access to necessary drugs? Can technologies significantly improve care and reduce costs? This book explains how the Canadian system works and assesses reforms underway.

This edition has been replaced by About Canada: Health Care, 2nd ed.

About the book

Authors

Hugh Armstrong

Hugh Armstrong is a professor in the School of Social Work and in the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Council on Aging of Ottawa and on the Community Advisory Committee of the Ottawa Hospital.

Pat Armstrong

Pat Armstrong is co-author or editor of such books on health care as Exposing Privatization: Women and Health Care Reform in Canada; Caring For/Caring About: Women, Home Care and Unpaid Caregiving; Heal Thyself: Managing Health Care Reform; Wasting Away: The Undermining of Canadian Health Care; Universal Health Care: What the United States Can Learn From Canada; Vital Signs: Nursing in Transition; and Take Care: Warning Signals for Canada’s Health System. She has co-edited books on the political economy of health and on feminism. She has also published on a wide variety of issues related to women’s work and to social policy.

She has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology at York University and Director of the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. She is a partner in the National Network on Environments and Women’s Health and chairs a working group on health reform that crosses the Centres of Excellence for Women’s Health. She is also a site director for the Ontario Training Centre in Health Services and Policy Research. Her current SSHRC-funded research looks at how women define quality health care. In addition, she has a CIHR-funded project that compares conditions in Canada’s long-term care facilities with those in Nordic countries. Like most of her past research, this project relies primarily on the perspectives of those who actually provide or manage care within the system.

She is involved as well in large collaborative research projects. One looks at the hidden costs and contributions in homecare; another explores health information technology and a third looks at precarious employment in health care. The latter project is connected to the development of the gender and work database, a project of the Canada Research Chair in Feminist Political Economy. Pat’s most recent funding supports research into cutbacks in women’s health services in Toronto.

In addition to these national and international research projects, Pat Armstrong is involved in a number of civil society organizations. She is a Board member of the Canadian Health Coalition, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Skyworks Foundation.