Author: Robert G. Evans

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

Perhaps the most striking feature of Figure 3 is the remarkable stability of the share of national income devoted to the public insurance programs. [...] Figure 4 shows the trends in health care spending relative to GDP for Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and for the average of all OECD countries for which data are available back to 1960. [...] This pattern of rapid growth parallels the experience of the whole Canadian health care system prior to 1971 (and the American experience down to the present), again illustrating the link between fragmented funding sources and rapid cost escalation.11 10 Even in the United States, the federal Medicare program for those sixty-five and older has been more successful than private insurers in controll [...] At the end of the 1960s there was growing concern among policy-makers (though not, apparently, the public) in both Canada and the United States about the continuing rapid escalation of health costs. [...] The completion of universal public medical coverage in Canada coincided with the immediate flattening of the previous trend; the failure to achieve national health insurance in the United States was associated with a continuation of their previous trend.