Roger Martin advocates government treat worker health plans as a taxable benefit.
Is Roger Martin having us on?
This morning the publicly funded Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity released a working paper on policy opportunities for Ontario’s health care system during Longwood’s Breakfast With The Chiefs speaker series.
Roger Martin, the former Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, was breezy in his presentation of the paper’s eight big ideas.
Some of it is the predictable low-hanging fruit, such as the need to get on with electronic medical records, reforming primary care delivery and focusing on end-of-life care (which accounts for one-third to one-half of a person’s lifetime health expenditures).
More alarming, three of the recommendations are essentially a manifesto for shifting the cost of health care away from the collective to the individual, and especially to low-income Ontarians.
In the brief question period after Martin’s presentation, his argument for co-payment on health care costs failed to get much attention despite being the most radical. Perhaps the audience felt it so far-fetched it was unlikely to get any traction from government despite coming from an advisor to the Premier.
OPSEU Diablogue 