(PS05)

Universal Medical Savings Accounts

Canada's Medicare system is progressively deteriorating. It faces recurrent crises in its present form despite a continuous, decades-long allocation of more tax resources. At the same time, Canadians clearly want to assure guaranteed, universal access to medical services. A new Medicare model has the potential to retain universality, restore service levels, control costs and introduce transparency and accountability to the system. That model, Universal Medical Savings Accounts (UMSAs), allocates existing public funding directly to individual citizen-consumers of health-care services.

Currently, federal and provincial governments underwrite Medicare budgets through a complex system of block grants to medical authorities. With UMSAs, the same money would be divided up among individual health-care consumers, each of whom would receive it in the form of credits deposited to a dedicated health-care account. With the exception of a mandatory requirement to purchase insurance coverage for long-term and catastrophic care, spending from the account would be controlled by the account-holder. Hospitals, clinics and doctors would charge patients for services rendered, with payments made from individual UMSAs. Any money left in the UMSA would remain the property of the account-holder.

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The Frontier Centre for Public Policy

is an independent public policy think tank whose mission is "to broaden the debate on our future through public policy research and education and to explore positive changes within our public institutions that support economic growth and opportunity."

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Feedback:

• RE: Sinclair is Wrong -- It Wasn't Genocide — March 5, 2012
  

  As a PhD in aboriginal history and culture in North America, I want to support Rodney Clifton and disagree with Judge Murray Sinclair and sociologist Chris Powell. I think it is wrong to equate the residential school experience with genocide.

  According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, genocide is the "deliberate extermination of a race or nation." What happened to aboriginal people in Canada was colonialism based on racism, a part of a worldwide phenomenon. It was not the deliberate murder of thousands of people.

  The fact is that some aboriginal people benefited from their residential school experience. Not everyone was sexually assaulted. I have met aboriginal people who value their Christian heritage and do not resent that their ancestors chose to adopt new and different religious views. Their views should be documented and respected as well as the negative ones.

  I do not intend to deny all the bad that happened. However, it is important to keep it in context. Sinclair and his commissioners should focus on the truth and reconciliation part of their mandate and not muddy the water by throwing around inflammatory rhetoric.

  I hope that the new museum of human rights will be able to educate Canadians about all these experiences of Canadians of different backgrounds, so we can understand each other and respect our differences while ensuring that all our citizens are treated fairly and equally under the law and in our economy and society.- RUTH SWAN