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Introduction to the Special Issue: Precarious Solidarity—Preferential Access in Canadian Health Care

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Abstract

Systems of universal health coverage may aspire to provide care based on need and not ability to pay; the complexities of this aspiration (conceptual, practical, and ethical) call for normative analysis. This special issue arises in the wake of a judicial inquiry into preferential access in the Canadian province of Alberta, the Vertes Commission. I describe this inquiry and set out a taxonomy of forms of differential and preferential access. Papers in this special issue focus on the conceptual specification of health system boundaries (the concept of medical need) and on the normative questions raised by complex models of funding and delivery of care, where patients, providers, and services cross system boundaries.

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Notes

  1. This list is modified and further developed from the one presented in my 2013 report.

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Funding

This study was funded by academic salary. As described in the paper, I produced a report by commission and testified as an independent expert opinion witness for the Alberta Health Services Preferential Access Inquiry.

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  1. Department of Bioethics, Dalhousie University, PO Box 15000, Halifax, NS, B3H 4R2, Canada

    Lynette Reid

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  1. Lynette Reid
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Correspondence to Lynette Reid.

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The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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Reid, L. Introduction to the Special Issue: Precarious Solidarity—Preferential Access in Canadian Health Care. Health Care Anal 25, 107–113 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-016-0338-y

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