Steps on the Road to Medicare:
Why Saskatchewan Led the Way Sylvia O. Fedoruk; Stuart Houston
Softcover, 176 pages
ISBN 0773525505
9780773525504
McGill-Queen's University Press
April 2003 (click the button below for the very best available price)
In Steps on the Road to Medicare Stuart Houston shows that
Saskatchewan has led in the development of publicly funded health
care since 1915.
Among Saskatchewan's many firsts were the payment of municipal
doctors, the development of municipal hospitals, and advances in the
treatment and prevention of tuberculosis - then the leading cause of
death - that culminated in January 1929 with universal free
diagnosis and treatment of TB. Given this background of leadership,
it was logical for North America's first social democratic
government, the CCF, led by Tommy Douglas, to go further, beginning
with medical care for pensioners and widows. This was quickly
followed by a universal, comprehensive health care plan, instituted
in the Swift Current region in July 1945, two years before Britain
began such a program. Universal, province-wide hospitalization
insurance was put in place in January 1946. Advances in psychiatry
consisted of the first inclusion of psychotic patients in an open
psychiatric ward in a general teaching hospital in 1955, while
cancer firsts included the first government-sponsored cancer
clinics, the first full-time cancer physicist, and the world's first
use of calibrated betatron and cobalt-60 machines for treating
cancer. Why was Saskatchewan so consistently first in health care?
Houston argues that not only was the population both altruistic and
ingenious with a well-developed spirit of co-operation but that its
leaders, including Maurice Seymour, R.G. Ferguson, Harold Johns, and
Tommy Douglas, showed unusual foresight. He details how from 1915
through 1962 government responded quickly to public need and
suggests that it should be equally responsive today.
