Control Health Costs or Consider Alternate Funding: LeBlanc

FINANCE--Control Health Costs or Consider Alternate Funding:
LeBlanc

The Nova Scotia government must manage the rate of growth in health costs or find other revenue sources to fund the province’s health care system, Finance Minister Neil LeBlanc told a Dartmouth audience this afternoon.

Health costs increased by 10.5 per cent a year through the late 1990s, the minister said, noting that at the same time economic growth was about three per cent.

At that rate, “health costs would consume every dollar available for government programs by 2011, just 10 years from today,” the minister said.

Mr. LeBlanc said the government will not cut health spending, but rather reduce that rate of increase to “a more reasonable, affordable level.”

The alternative to managed growth is more revenue, in the form of more health user fees and fee increases, the minister said. “That’s not our first choice. A far better alternative is to manage the rate of growth.”

Mr. LeBlanc told members of the Dartmouth Downtown Development Corporation that the health system needs strategic investments that will have the long-term result of reducing the rate of increase. For starters, he said Auditor General Roy Salmon was right when he stated that the province does not have information systems in place to support the kind of long-term decisions that are required to control costs.

Mr. LeBlanc told the audience that despite popular misconceptions, government has never reduced health spending on an actual, budget-to-budget basis. In fact, government will spend more on health care next year than it will this year.

The minister said government’s job is to secure health and other public services in a climate of financial stability where Nova Scotians enjoy a fair and competitive tax environment.