Trudeau pitches 10-year health-care deal with $46B in new spending
CBC
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Tuesday the federal government is prepared to increase health-care spending by an eye-popping $196.1 billion over the next decade — a cash injection Ottawa is pitching as a generational fix for an ailing system.
Of the $196.1 billion promised by the federal government for health care, $46.2 billion will be entirely new spending — funds that go above and beyond what was already budgeted for the years ahead.
To start, provinces and territories will get an unconditional $2 billion boost to the Canada Health Transfer (CHT) to address what the federal government calls "immediate pressure on the health-care system, especially in pediatric hospitals, emergency rooms and surgical and diagnostic backlogs."
Trudeau's proposal also includes a five per cent annual hike to the CHT for the next five years, with a built-in mechanism to permanently increase funding in the years after.
After the first five years, the CHT escalator will revert to a three per cent increase each year — but provinces and territories will be starting from a larger base after years of larger than normal increases.
Government data suggests this funding boost will increase the CHT by some 61 per cent over the next 10 years. That amounts to about $17.3 billion in new money for the provinces and territories to prop up a faltering system.
To access the enhanced CHT, provinces must first commit to improving how health data is "collected, shared, used and reported to Canadians to promote greater transparency on results, and to help manage public health emergencies," the government said in a background document supplied to reporters.
The federal government wants this data so that it can better track health-care performance and outcomes.
It also says it want this information shared more efficiently between primary doctors, pharmacists, specialists and the hospital system.
"Canadians should be able to access their own health information and benefit from it being shared between health workers across health settings and across jurisdictions," the government said in its backgrounder.
Trudeau is also pitching $25 billion over 10 years to advance what the government is calling "shared priorities."
As part of ongoing health-care talks, the federal government has said it wants to sign bilateral deals with each province and territory to earmark money for the health-related issues that each jurisdiction cares about most.
But Ottawa is insisting that those new funds be directed at four priority areas: family health services, health workers and backlogs, mental health and substance use and a "modernized health system."
The new federal funding will be contingent on the provinces and territories chipping in some of their own money for these "shared priorities."