Healthy lifestyle is a very important thing
TheGrowing Private-Sector Involvement in Canadian Public Health Care Systems
This week, the provincial government in Ontario announced that it was expanding the number of private clinics providing medical services.
Right now, Ontario has about 900 such clinics, and they mostly offer medical imaging and cataract surgeries. Sylvia Jones, the province’s health minister, said this week that the government was expanding its program to include hip and knee replacements.
The province Is being careful not to violate the Canada Health
Act by requiring people to pay for medically necessary procedures. That would jeopardize the 20 billion Canadian dollars the province will receive this year from the federal government for health care. While the clinics will be privately operated, their procedures will be covered under the provincial health care plan as if they had been performed in public hospitals.
Ms. Jones said that the expansion would allow more such procedures
to be performed and that doing so would cut wait times for patients. Her critics say it will further undermine the public system, that it may actually increase wait times and that it is a step toward full privatization of health care.
The government’s announcement came at about the same time as the release of a study from the C.D. Howe Institute that does not take a side in the debate but tallies up the level of private health care already in place in Canadian provinces.
Democrats propose bill to defend IVF, slam ‘Republican attacks on reproductive health care’
As Republicans pass restrictions on abortion and gender-affirming health care across the United States, Democratic legislators are introducing a bill to protect access to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other assisted reproductive technology (ART) services.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and U.S. Rep. Susan Wild of Pennsylvania announced the legislation Thursday, which builds on the previously introduced Right to Build Families Act to expand protections to the treatments. Duckworth, who said she “wouldn’t have [her] beautiful baby girls” without IVF, said that the proposed bill will protect against “Republicans’ escalating attacks on reproductive healthcare.”
“Since the Supreme Court threw out Roe v. Wade,
our nation has seen a wave of Republican-led states not only enacting strict abortion bans that severely limit their residents’ right to access basic reproductive care — but also pushing proposals that would jeopardize access to IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies that millions of Americans need to start or grow their families,” Duckworth said in a press release.
Republican lawmakers in several states have proposed legislation restricting access to ART. In one leaked audio recording, a leading anti-abortion group instructed state legislators to avoid discussing IVF and contraception for now, but that restrictions should be revisited in a few years.
Beyond guaranteeing access to IVF and ART services,
the Access to Family Building Act would also ensure the right for an individual’s use or disposition of their reproductive genetic materials, as well as grant them and healthcare providers in states with limited ART access the ability to sue. The legislation would also allow the Department of Justice to pursue civil action against any state, government official, individual, or entity who attempts to violate the law or restrict the care in any way.
“I have witnessed firsthand the heartbreak of women struggling to conceive and the strain expensive assisted reproductive treatment can have on them and their families,” Wild said in the release. “The last thing the government should do is make life harder on these women by imposing restrictions on the care they can receive.”
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