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From Health to Welfare

其他書名	Federal Government Policies Regarding Standards of Public Health for Canadians, 1919-1945
出版	University of Alberta, 1980
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=wttcjwEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋The Canadian federal Department of Health was established in 1919 as an answer to reform demands stemming out of the First World War. It was to handle some specific problems and to co-ordinate health activities for the country. Its inability to fulfil its mandate was due in large part to insufficient funds and confused jurisdiction. During its first decade of existence, it concerned itself mostly with health matters, generally to do with quarantine, it had inherited from other departments and with campaigns against narcotics and venereal disease. Other reform demands--to do with child welfare, housing, hospitalization, public health engineering, medical research and pollution--received less attention, the Department's handling of these items never going much beyond the release of publicity and the production of information. In 1928, the Department was coupled with the Department of Soldiers' Reestablishment. Demands for health reforms were not so fervid as they had been a decade before and in the intervening period, Health had failed to establish a firm base for itself. The new Department of Pensions and National Health concerned itself mostly with care-taking duties. During the Depression there were again calls for leadership in the field of health. High levels of unemployment meant that Canadians were denied all but the most necessary medical care, were unable to pay for care they did receive, and were subject to deteriorating physical conditions due to destitution. Demands were made on the federal government, in health as in other concerns, to make up the short-fall. The Dominion was reluctant to shoulder duties that would certainly be expensive, possibly long-term and probably outside the realm of its constitutional obligations. But although federal health activities were cut back at the beginning of the decade, by the end the Department was studying various reforms, notably health insurance. Before the Department had taken any momentous steps, another war once again made national health a high priority. The Second World War placed extra demands upon the health branch of Pensions and National Health. However, despite the reinvigoration, most of the new activities were in the nature of short-term measures to get Canada through the war rather than long-term schemes for general betterment of the nation's health. The major exception was the Department's study of health insurance, meant to jibe with other forms of social insurance being considered as reforms for the post-war period. It was hoped that such insurance would provide for a high standard of health by providing individual Canadians with the means to purchase needed medical care. A concomitant system of grants would also be made to increase the supply of facilities and personnel. Health insurance failed to gain acceptance for many reasons but, most importantly, because it was felt that the old health needs could be partly provided for within the context of the new welfare schemes. Federal concerns in both these fields were to be handled by the new Department of National Health and Welfare instituted in 1944.