The first health-related promise made by the PQ during the campaign was for “revolutionary change” in seniors’ care. The PQ would institute a provincial policy on home care, boost annual funding from $381 to $500 million a year, and provide more support for family caregivers.

It would also create a special fund to ensure the needs of the aging population are met within the public system, and that services are accessible to all regardless of income.

the health minister-designate (although not yet official) is Dr. Réjean Hébert, a renowned geriatrician and until two years ago dean of medicine at the Université de Sherbrooke

And second, a lid must be placed on APP program payments. Funding for benefit and incentive programs should be folded into the negotiation of fee schedules, recognizing that they are, like fees, simply part of the average prices physicians receive for their services.

the coming increases in numbers have, once again, foreclosed for decades the possibilities for exploiting the full competence of complementary and substitute health personnel, expanding interprofessional team practice and in general, shifting the mix

Including rapid growth in net immigration, the annual "crop" has nearly doubled.

President Obama, through the health care law that was a centerpiece of his domestic agenda, seeks a vast expansion of Medicaid, which currently covers more than 60 million Americans — compared with 50 million in Medicare

envisions adding as many as 17 million people to the rolls by allowing everyone with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty level to enroll, including many childless adults. While the Supreme Court ruled in June that states could opt out of the expansion, Medicaid — and federal spending on it — is still likely to grow significantly if Mr. Obama wins a second term.

Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan would take Medicaid in the opposite direction. They would push for the repeal of the health care law and replace the current Medicaid program with block grants, giving each state a lump sum and letting them decide eligibility and benefits. (Currently, the federal government sets minimum requirements, like covering all children under the poverty level, which some states surpass. It also provides unlimited matching funds.)

CUPE Nova Scotia President Danny Cavanagh responded to the provincial government's request for input on proposed changes to the Nova Scotia Health Services and Insurance Act.

urges the province to take further steps

fully establish all five criteria of the Canada Health Act in the body of the legislation; strengthen the rules against conflict of interest in a number of areas; prohibit physicians from opting out of the public system, following Ontario's example; prohibit private insurance for public insured services, as five other provinces do; establish a democratic and evidence-based process for decisions on public health insurance coverage; continue moving away from fee-for-service physician payment by expanding community health centres; strengthen the audit provisions for all publicly-funded health care programs; prohibit the co-mingling of insured and uninsured services; regulate block fees, a significant access barrier; strengthen the rules against queue jumping, using the Ontario model; implement a complete patient safety program and healthcare associated infection strategy, building on the government's first steps around public reporting; introduce minimum staff to patient ratios to improve quality and patient outcomes; include robust whistleblower protection; end the contracting-out of hospital services to private clinics, a practice that diverts public dollars from care to profit and drains professionals from the public system.

As Goar rightly points out, home care workers — who are predominantly women and among the lowest paid workers in the province — are deliberately excluded from key Employment Standards Act (ESA) protections that would give them access to severance and termination pay.

Because for-profit home care companies need to pay shareholder dividends, home care workers are paid as little as $12.50 per hour and have no full-time employment, no pensions, no benefits, often no mileage and no paid travel-time to clients’ homes. Conditions are so bad that the annual turnover rate of caregivers is 57 per cent.

"Convalescent care" beds are a form of "short-stay" beds in long-term care (LTC) facilities.  Convalescent beds receive an extra $70.94 more per day than standard long-term care beds.  That's 45.7% more funding than the $155.18 for a standard bed.   Started in 2005, the LTC "convalescent care" program is now a “Home First Program” that is designed, in part, to reduce hospital Alternate Level of Care (ALC) days.

The for-profit section of the long-term care industry sees convalescent care as a growth part of the LTC industry.

the average length of stay as the length of stay for the short-stay long term care beds varies from 25 to 65 days, while the ‘long term’ LTC beds have an average stay of 3.1 years

In 2012, parliament in England passed a law effectively ending the NHS by abolishing the 60-year duty on the government to secure and provide healthcare for all. From 2013, there will be no National Health Service in England, and tax funding will increasingly flow to global healthcare corporations. In contrast, Scotland and Wales will continue to have a publicly accountable national health service.

NHS hospitals and services are being sold off or incorporated; land and buildings are being turned over to bankers and equity investors. RBS, Assura, Serco and Carillion, to name but a few, are raking in billions in taxpayer funds for leasing out and part-operating PFI hospitals, community clinics and GP surgeries that we once owned.

The great NHS divestiture, which began in 1990 with the introduction of the internal market and accelerated under the PFI programme, now takes the form of franchising, management buyout and corporate takeovers of our public hospitals. Virgin has been awarded £630m to provide services to vulnerable people and children in Surrey and Devon. Circle has been given the franchise for NHS hospital Hinchingbrooke and is now struggling to contain its debts. London teaching hospitals are merging to give them greater leverage for borrowing and cuts.

The growing crisis of public private partnership (P3) hospitals in Britain has now forced the health minister to announce that he will be sending in “hit squads” to make savings at twelve hospitals where the P3 contracts have gone “horribly wrong”

This is a follow up from the government's February announcement that the twelve P3 (or, as the British call them, "PFI") hospitals would get £1.5 billion in emergency funding to help them avoid cutting patient services as a result of their P3 deals.

we will be prepared to financially help them, solely with the burden of the PFI repayments, because it is a millstone round their neck."

small Dutch town of Weesp

Hogewey, where Jo Verhoeff lives, has developed an innovative, humane and apparently affordable way of caring for people with dementia.

a traditional nursing home for people with dementia – you know: six storeys, anonymous wards, locked doors, crowded dayrooms, non-stop TV, central kitchen, nurses in white coats, heavy medication

Two of the region’s corporate giants — one focused on government health insurance, the other specializing in communities for seniors — were acquired by larger industry players last week, as consolidation heats up in health-related sectors.

Insurance giant Aetna announced it will buy Bethesda-based Coventry Health Care, which provides Medicare and Medicaid services, for $5.7 billion. Two days later, Ohio-based Health Care REIT announced an $845 million deal to acquire McLean’s Sunrise Senior Living, which manages 300 senior living facilities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, including 25 in the Washington region.

the health care industry is increasingly turning to consolidation as a way to cope with smaller profit margins and higher compliance costs that many anticipate when the federal government’s health care reforms under the Affordable Care Act take effect.

The provincial government's decision to pursue public-private partnerships (P3s) in the construction of the North Battle ford hospital and the new Plains outpatient surgery centre in Regina puts taxpayers at risk.

The experience of P3s in Canada and Britain shows that these end up costing more than traditional government financing.

In 2008, Ontario's auditor general revealed that the Brampton's P3 hospital could have been built for $194 million less if it had been done through