The health care charade continues: a non-deal with recycled money and conditions the feds won’t enforce
by nearly 6 per cent per year, which means the provinces’ contribution has grown by rather less than that.
Of course it did. You can call it a transfer “for health,” but there’s no way of actually monitoring it – the money doesn’t come with little labels on it. It all goes into general revenues, to be spent as the provinces please. The only way the feds could know for sure whether the provinces had spent the money they sent them “for health” on health is if they knew what provincial spending on health would have been in its absence – which is unknowable.
In any case, what significance do we attach to that dazzling figure of $196-billion? Is that a lot or a little? It seems like a lot, compared with, say, the cost of dinner out. But in the context of total public spending on health care, likely to exceed $3-trillion over the next decade? The same applies to the $46-billion in actual new money, $21-billion of it earmarked for the Canada Health Transfer. That, too, sounds like a lot.
The really new part is the $25-billion the government has set aside for bilateral side deals with each of the provinces – deals that have also yet to be negotiated. The reason for these is murky. The professed rationale is to take account of the “unique needs” of each province. Well, no; that’s what the CHT is for. That’s why you hand out the money in cash: so that each province can spend it in the way best suited to its particular “needs.
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