Paving The Way to Private healthcare
I read on Twitter this morning about Loblaws/Shoppers becoming a primary care network in Ontario. A Bloomberg article from March of this year says Shoppers Drug Market unit is buying Lifemark Health Group in an $845-million all-cash deal.
Lifemark provides physiotherapy and massage therapy, among other services, at more than 300 clinics across Canada https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/loblaw-bulks-up-shoppers-with-845m-lifemark-health-takeover-1.1737228.
Last year in 2021 Loblaw announced their services as primary-care https://www.loblaw.ca/en/shoppers-drug-mart-to-expand-managed-health-clinics-to-cities-across-ontario and family practice clinic, providing patients with convenient, one-stop access to medical services and trusted advice.
Perhaps it isn’t too hard to see why public health care is crumbling across Canada. After all, Canada spends more than $300 billion annually https://www.cma.ca/news/health-care-funding-canada on health care. In order for the public to agree to private healthcare, public healthcare will need to keep collapsing for a few more years.
That’s about 13% of our GDP – the second highest among OECD countries.
More than half of health spending goes to three areas: hospitals (25%), drugs (14%) and physicians (13%).
More than 70% of health care spending is publicly funded through general tax revenues.
The provinces and territories generate 78% of the cost, with the federal government providing the rest through the Canada Health Transfer (CHT).
#cdnpoli #healthcare #primaryCare #GDP #cost #politics