Health care and hospital funding : Despite significant new revenue and lower than expected debt costs, health care spending is almost exactly identical to the amounts planned in last year’s Budget for 2015-2018. The total health budget for 2015/16 came in (on an “interim” basis) basically the same as planned in the 2015 Budget (that is unusual, more often they under-spend the health budget). For 2016/17 and 2017/18, they plan to keep basically to the targets set out in the 2015 budget (plus a small increase of $100 million in each of those two years -- an extra 0.2%). Overall, health is planned to increase 1.97% in 2016/17 and 1.93% in 2017/18. That will see health expenditures fall again as a percentage of the economy but is a little bit higher than the planned all-program expense increase (of 1% in 2016/17 and 1.7% in 2017/18). That is far short of costs pressure due to increased utilization, aging, population growth, and inflation. Hospitals are budgete
Notes from Leftwords -- Doug Allan