After Medicare: Regionalization and Canadian Health Care Reform

In the immediate postwar era the primary object of health reform among the advanced industrial democracies was to expand, if not universalize, access to a broad spectrum of health services through sustained, high levels of government-mandated spending. The fiscal crises of the 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new generation of policies devoted to balancing the imperatives of guaranteeing access to basic health and social services and to improving the accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care industries. In Canada, the regionalization of health care administration emerged as the most prominent strategy for grappling with the contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary health reform. This essay traces the historical evolution of federal-provincial deliberations that elevated regionalization to the forefront of health policy-making in the new era of fiscal restraint, and further, assesses recent efforts to institutionalize regional health authorities.