Roy Romanow, who is leading a commission looking into the future of Canada's health-care system, says Ottawa should set a "minimum threshold" of federal funding that should never be dropped.

CTV News Staff

Roy Romanow, who is leading a commission looking into the future of Canada's health-care system, says Ottawa should set a "minimum threshold" of federal funding that should never be dropped.

Romanow said that while recent federal budgets have seen the beginning of improved funding, Ottawa still contributes less than it once did, and less than it should now.

"I, therefore, believe that there is considerable merit in having a minimum threshold of federal funding established, a floor below which it should not fall," Romanow told an audience of the Canadian Club in Winnipeg.

While Romanow didn't specify what the minimum limit should be, he said Ottawa should start moving toward it "immediately" in order to keep health care alive.

"The system does need more money if it is to meet today's needs and if it is to successfully transform itself for the future," he said.

The much-anticipated Romanow commission report is scheduled for release next Thursday. It follows a year of hearings and is expected to call for a large injection of cash into the health-care system.

It's expected his final report will echo a Senate committee recommended last month calling for extra $5 billion be pumped into the system. The committee suggested the money could come from new taxes. However, it's unclear if Romanow's final report will suggest such a course.

Romanow also doused cold water on the premise that health-care spending in Canada is out of line with that in other industrialized countries.

"In fact, we are actually spending less on health care as a percentage of our GDP than we did 10 years ago," Romanow said. "Health care spending in Canada is not out of control by any comparative terms."

Privatized health care is not the way to solve the funding issue and wouldn't shorten waiting times for treatment, Romanow said.

"The suggestion that greater private sector participation in our health care system is the solution to the problems of timely access and wait lists defies logic," he said.

"Because the solutions sometimes advocated amount to a cannibalization of the public system."

Dr. Brian Day, who runs a private, for-profit hospital in Vancouver, said Romanow has it all wrong.

"Mr. Romanow had a lot of evidence that the private sector could help save medicare, but . . . he has chosen to ignore evidence that he didn't like and instead he's listened to rhetoric from a lot of self-interest groups," Day told CTV's Canada AM in an interview.

"He has no concept of the funding system, the global budget funding system of Canadian health care," he said.

Whatever his recommendations, Romanow said his final report will be based on hard evidence from the medical community and rooted in Canadian values.

"I believe that the imagination and the ingenuity which has helped define us as a nation ... will be and can be applied to our health care system," Romanow said.