ABSTRACT
The importance of health care in the economy is one of the principal features of Canadian public policy. The widespread and sustained effort by successive federal governments to contain the growth of health care expenditures has been a difficult exercise that has produced widespread changes to Canada’s health care system. Yet the fact remains that an increasing allocation of the economy’s spending to health care over the past generation has predictably generated an increasing use of the economy’s resources to delivery of this demand (see Table 12.1). Among the industrial countries, Canada has been regarded as allocating relatively high proportions of its resources to health care, following behind the United States, which uses the largest proportion of all countries.
