HEALTH LAW, ETHICS & POLICY WORKSHOP SERIES
presents
Colleen Flood
Associate Professor
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
CHARTER RIGHTS & HEALTH CARE FUNDING: A TYPOLOGY OF HEALTH RIGHTS LITIGATION
Thursday, February 11, 2010
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2)
84 Queen's Park
Abstract
Canadian health consumers have increasingly relied on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to demand certain therapies and reasonably timely access to care. By analysing the outcomes of these Charter challenges through a systematic typology, this study seeks to examine how a rights-based discourse affects the allocation of health care resources. First, successful Charter challenges can in theory lead to courts granting positive rights to therapies or to timely care, followed by an adequate enforcement of these rights. There are no Canadian cases in this category. Second, claimants may successfully establish a right to certain health services; however, subsequently government fails to deliver on this right. Third, successful litigation may create negative rights, i.e. rights to access care or private health insurance without government interference. Fourth, consumers can fail in their legal pursuit of a right but galvanize public support in the process, ultimately effecting the desired policy changes. Lastly, a failed lawsuit can stifle an entire advocacy campaign for the sought-after therapies. The typology illustrates the need to examine both legal and policy outcomes of health right litigation. This broader analysis reveals that the pursuit of health rights seems to have had largely a regressive rather than progressive impact on Canadian Medicare.
Biography
Colleen M. Flood is a Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy and the Scientific Director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Institute of Health Services and Policy Research (CIHR – IHSPR). She is also an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Toronto and is cross-appointed into the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and the School of Public Policy. Professor Flood obtained her B.A. and LL.B. (Honours) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand and her LL.M. and SJD from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her primary area of scholarship is in comparative health care policy, public/private financing of health care systems, health care reform, and accountability and governance issues more broadly. She has been consulted on comparative health policy and governance issues by both the Senate Social Affairs Committee studying health care in Canada and by the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada (the Romanow Commission).
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please go to our web site at www.law.utoronto.ca/healthlaw or contact Melissa Casco at m.casco@utoronto.ca.
