News Archives

November 9, 2006

Health ethics vs. expenses

REPORT: A new study questions if aging population or costly technology is to blame for rising medical costs.

by Paul Walton
(reprinted with permission from the Nanaimo News Bulletin)

A report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives looking at the cost of technology in terms of keeping people alive only raises significant ethical problems, says a Nanaimo advocate for the dying.

Wendy Pratt, the executive director of the Nanaimo Community Hospice Society, said the report raises the very difficult issue of how such technology should be used, how such decisions are made and by whom.

The CCPA paper is intended to examine health costs as part of the B.C. Conservation on health. Pratt will become head of the B.C. Hospice Palliative Care Association in May.

“The main gist of this report is around that whole ethical dilemma of should we provide levels of care… just because we can? Or should we be withholding these advances?” asked Pratt. “Who gets to decide when is the right time to give care and when is the right time to withhold it?”

The report looks at the high cost of health care, claiming that “advances in technological possibilities,” not increasing numbers of the elderly, are a greater factor in rising health costs.

“There is little to suggest a demographic time bomb is about to go off,” states the report.
But Pratt disputes that claim, saying they have underestimated the impact of increasing numbers of dying people over the next several decades.

Statistics Canada, she said, shows that by 2020 the rates of death in Canada will have increased by 35%.

“If we’re going to have that kind of increase, how could it not affect us?”

Though the report claims that a “modest expansion” of health care services is possible by matching health care funding with the same proportion of economic growth, Pratt said the premise is flawed. That might work if current levels of health care were adequate, she said.

“I am wondering if this report assumes that we have sufficient services right now,” she said. “We definitely do not. There are wait lists everywhere you look and in palliative care there are woefully inadequate resources available.”