KPMG’s Mark Britnell at the OHA HealthAchieve
Speakers at this week’s Ontario Hospital Association HealthAchieve say it’s important to transform health care, not cut it.
Don Berwick, former Administrator for U.S. Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the OHA conference the U.S. presently spends 17.6 per cent of its economy (GDP) on health care and is headed for 24 per cent, or almost one dollar out of every four spent south of the border.
In a later session in the afternoon, the UK’s Mark Britnell, Chairman and Partner of KPMG’s Global Practice, spoke about advanced economies being “increasingly burdened” by rising health care costs, a situation “exacerbated by the fiscal crisis.”
Britnell called economist and banker Don Drummond’s report on how to get Ontario’s house in order one of the best he’s read, even though many of Drummond’s projections have already proven to be wrong.
Neither Berwick or Britnell ever mentioned that for three consecutive years now Canada’s health care spending has dropped not only as a share of GDP, but also as a percentage of provincial spending. Britnell still shows charts claiming that Canada’s health care costs are going to rise by a staggering 2 per cent of GDP.
