Health care expenditures, public administration and the business cycle

The looming question for Canadian public health care services is "How will public administrations in Canada sustain their health care expenditures during the next few years, given the pressure from debt recovery and the new federal payment transfer for health care?” This paper is concerned with the financial resources jointly devoted to health care by federal and provincial governments in Canada. [...] The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has produced estimates of total and itemized HCE at the levels of municipal, provincial and territorial, and federal governments, of social security funds and the consolidated public sector for the 1975-2011 period (CIHI 2011:74). [...] Public administrations in Canada have in the recent past reduced the share of tax revenue and increased the share of nontax revenue in their total revenue. [...] Thus, federal transfers for health services in this period were interpolated, using the proportion of transfers for health compared with the transfers for health, education and social programs at the beginning of the period as the starting point, and using the same proportion in 2004-2005 at the end point. [...] Choosing a HCE Universe In this paper, we are interested in the ability of public administrations in Canada to sustain Medicare and, more generally, in their activities in the health care sector.