National Network for Equitable Library Service

Health care is Canada's best loved social program--and for good reason. For over forty years, Canadians have enjoyed high quality health services based on need rather than on ability to pay. Yet we hear almost daily accounts of problems with the system. We are bombarded with warnings that public health care is unsustainable, especially in light of the baby boomer generation reaching retirement age. Such stories can help undermine our support for public care even though they are often based on poor, partial or even false information. Our best defense of a public system is knowledge about how it works and how it can be improved in order to keep it. Knowledge is essential to democracy and knowledge about our health care system essential to keep and develop Canada's best loved social programme. This book is intended to provide a guide to what is included and what is excluded from our public health care system as well as to who benefits from it. In doing so, it explains how we managed to develop a public system and what we need to know about current strategies for reforms. Those who fought hard to ensure access first to hospital and then to doctor care knew these services were just the beginning of a comprehensive system. They knew then that homecare, long-term care and pharmaceuticals were essential components. These services are even more necessary today with new technologies that help us live outside hospital care and doctor supervision, as some provinces and territories have recognized. Yet we are still waiting for these services to be included in many parts of the country.