Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I’d like to talk a bit about our health care system. Across Canada and including here in the North. For some 20 years now we’ve been telling ourselves to do more with less, except in health care, and northern health care is no exception. As Members know, health care costs are constantly on the rise. In a recent speech by Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the Canadian Medical Association, he spoke of the need for “a strategic, considered, and focused plan for improving care for patients.”

The NWT health care system struggles to provide excellent and accessible service and still keep the health budget in check. Keeping our costs under control is no mean feat given our huge geographic obstacles and our small population, which is often widely spread and isolated.

There is a new model for the provision of health care under discussion which could revamp Canada’s health care system and improve services. To quote from CBC Radio, February 15th , in

describing this model they said, “Under this reform, all services carried out by this hospital, including

not only patient care, diagnostics, and all manner of procedures, but also teaching and research, were converted into revenue-generating activities.” How is that different from what we do now? Well, now the current practice is to fund our hospitals and health authorities on a global funding model. That means that authorities receive an annual budget allotment and funds are not tied to numbers of patients or quality of service measures. It doesn’t matter if the number of patients seen drops by 25 or 30 percent. The presumably unused funds are not clawed back.

Changing to patient focused funding is a fundamental shift in policy relative to the delivery of health care, but some change is necessary for our current good levels of service to survive and, where it’s needed, to get better. And we must seriously consider this model.

Funding hospitals and health centres for services delivered and paying doctors by salary instead of on a fee-for-service basis has been proven to work and to work successfully. Admittedly, there are problems with this model. There are expenses associated with the transition from one model to the next, and our smallest communities may not fit into this model, but we have to at least think about it.

I look forward to discussing this idea with the Department of Health and my colleagues on the Standing Committee on Social Programs.