There’s a limit to the amount of debt any student, family or business can take on. The same can be said for governments. Today, we answer an employee’s question about the rising demand for health care and the province’s capacity to take on more debt. We’re not financial experts, but we do our best to answer.

If you have questions or suggestions on this or any other topic, we welcome them; email us any day or night.

Today’s answered question

Q. How does the provincial government expect to meet the needs of the coming shortage of acute and long-term care without seeking credit being issued from the Bank of Canada?

A. Now that’s the $64,000 question! Or, should we say (multi) million-dollar question?

We don’t mean to make light of your question — in fact, you’ve hit the crux of the matter. There’s a limit to the amount of debt the B.C. government can reasonably take on due to interest costs — costs we as taxpayers have to pay. That is why the provincial government is asking all health authorities to find new ways to be innovative and work within existing resources. At first this might sound unrealistic, but we’ve risen to the challenge before and we’re confident we can do so again.

Many credible studies indicate that anywhere from 20 to 40% of the resources we put into health care are “wasted”. The reasons are wide-ranging and include everything from unnecessary duplication of work and purchasing of supplies, to hospital-acquired infections resulting in longer lengths of stay and preventable falls in residential care leading to hospital admissions … to name a few. We expect everyone has witnessed or experienced wasteful work at some point, and perhaps more often than we’d want to admit.

But money isn’t the only challenge. Just as the “silver tsunami” will increase demands on health care, the workforce is aging, too.  Even if we had substantially larger budgets, there wouldn’t be enough health care providers to do the job. So instead we need to identify — and eliminate — work and spending that doesn’t add value for patients and clients. This will help us to gradually afford the growth in demand without breaking the bank.

For more on this topic, we recommend our new president and CEO’s first blog and the book Chronic Condition by Globe and Mail columnist, Jeffrey Simpson.