Abstract

The 1990s were a decade of restraint that affected all components of the health enterprise, including medicare, and most certainly hospitals and health research.

In Canada, from 1990 to 1997, the average annual change in public funding in constant dollars per capita was -2.2% for hospitals, -3.9% for capital funding and -0.5% for physicians. In 1997, health research funding (HRF) was one-eighth of the per capita expenditure in the United States and ranked Canada sixth among G-7 countries (Figure 1)