In a previous post, we saw that if provincial government spending in New Brunswick over the past few decades is adjusted for inflation, non-health care spending has not increased since the mid-90s. Rising health care expenditures are largely responsible for spending increases since then. And how are those health care dollars being spent? The numbers below suggest that NB is not doing as well as some other provinces with respect to hospital operations costs; that might mean there are some potential savings to be had there. But I expect those ‘savings’ to be reallocated to other health care spending issues (e.g. wait-time reductions). The goal should not be to reduce spending by a certain amount, or keep increases at a particular rate, but to improve services while spending the same proportion of tax revenue.
Let’s start with a re-post of this chart (using data from Statistics Canada and CIHI’s National Health Expenditure Database), where spending (EXP) and revenue (REV) patterns for the past few decades are adjusted for inflation:
by 