Canadian Healthcare

February 2009

Value for Money: Making Canadian Health Care Stronger

www.CanadaValuesHealth.ca

CONTENTS 01 Summary: If you have only 5 minutes, read this 13 Foreword: An invitation 15 Section One Why “value for money”? Why now? 19 Section Two What is “value”? 25 Section Three Double double – where’s the trouble? 28 Section Four Understanding what goes in and what we get 39 Section Five More is not always better 44 Summing up: Where do we go from here? 46 References 47 List of figures 47 Acknowledgements 48 About the Health Council of Canada

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Are you concerned about our ability to sustain health care in Canada? Can we pay for spending increases year after year?

> The Health Council of Canada wants Canadians > Thinking about value for money raises challenging

to get involved in this issue – to ask what value we get for our health care money, and to offer ideas and solutions that ensure we use these dollars wisely.

> We currently spend about $172 billion a year

on health care, an average of more than $5,000 per Canadian. Yet we know little about what we get for that investment. We have a fairly accurate picture of what services are delivered, but we don’t know much about the benefits or outcomes of those services.

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questions. What do we want to achieve with our health care investments? How much does health care contribute to people’s health, and how does it compare to other worthy causes such as education and the environment that also need public dollars and also contribute to health?

> By looking at health care through the value-for-

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money lens, we can begin to make choices about how to improve and sustain our health care...