Medicare (Canada)
Medicare () is an unofficial designation used to refer to the publicly funded, single-payer health care system of Canada. Canada does not have a unified national health care system; instead, the system consists of 13 provincial and territorial health insurance plans that provides universal health care coverage to Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and certain temporary residents. These systems are individually administered on a provincial or territorial basis, within guidelines set by the federal government. The formal terminology for the insurance system is provided by the "Canada Health Act" and the health insurance legislation of the individual provinces and territories.
Canada Health Act
The health care insurance plans must cover "all insured health services provided by hospitals, medical practitioners or dentists" (Section 9). The "Act" lists, in the Definitions (Section 2), what is meant by insured services - in general, this retains the restriction to hospital and physician services arising from the earlier legislation. The provinces are allowed, but not required, to insure additional services. Note that the CHA refers to "surgical dental services" but only if these must be provided within a hospital. In practice, this almost never occurs, and the annual health expenditure data published by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) confirm that Canadian dental services are almost entirely financed privately. Lobbying by other providers, including nurses, led the act to speak of 'practitioners' rather than physicians; physician services had to be covered, but provinces were allowed, but not required, to define other health professions as qualifying under the "Act". To date, this provision has been used only occasionally; for example, some provinces have added Midwifery, which means that their services are also fully publicly paid for.