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Better Now: Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care For All Canadians

Our ally Dr. Danielle Martin has written an important new book titled Better Now: Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care For All Canadians.


Dr. Martin practices in the Family Practice Health Centre at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, appears regularly on CBC’s The National, and is an advocate for public health care in Canada.


The promotion for this book highlights, “As a family doctor, Dr. Danielle Martin sees the cracks and challenges in our health care system every day. A passionate believer in the value of fairness that underpins the Canadian health care system, Dr. Martin is on a mission to improve Medicare in ways that will benefit us all. In Better Now, she shows how bold fixes are both achievable and affordable. Her patients’ stories and her own family’s experiences illustrate the evidence she brings together about what works best to improve health care for all.”


The six big ideas she explores in the book are:

1- The Return to Relationships: Ensure relationship-based primary health care for every Canadian

2- A Nation With a Drug Problem: Bring prescription drugs under Medicare

3- Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There: Reduce unnecessary tests and interventions

4- Doing More With Less: Reorganize health care delivery to reduce wait times and improve quality

5- Basic Income for Basic Health: Implement a basic income guarantee

6- The Anatomy of Change: Scale up successful solutions across the country.


A fuller tour schedule will be announced next week, but for now confirmed dates include:

January 18 – Ottawa

January 23 – Vancouver

January 26 – Toronto


Council of Canadians health care campaign Michael Butler has written, “A universal pharmacare program would improve patient safety, prescribing appropriateness, therapeutic value, evidence-based drug evaluations, clinical trial transparency and drug monitoring, among other initiatives. We need better medicine, not more medicine. Canadians know that it is time for change, with 91 per cent of us supporting universal pharmacare.” Our action alert that echoes Dr. Martin’s call to “bring prescription drugs under Medicare” can be found here.


For information on the Council of Canadians health care campaign, please click here.