All things Canadian.....

Harper mentioned the Kirby report in his speech today and I saw this comment at Calgary Grit responding to Bart saying; "Now...I'll admit I don't really understand how per sey Harper plans to cut wait times without injecting any money into health care or by dramatically changing the system":

How do you do it? Just take a book out of the Kirby report.
The feds establish the wait times. If a province can't meet the times, an agency (National Wait time registry?) just books the procedure in another jurisdiction. I for one have no problem with driving to Montreal or Halifax for surgery (I would still drive to the States for an MRI).
After that you just submit your receipts, Dingwall style, to the wait time agency (as does the other province). Next month the whole amount is deducted from the health transfers to your province. Simple and very business like. And it provides tremendous incentives to shorten wait times, lest Fredericton have to pick up my hotel bill.

The Kirby report can be read here, and more specifically the Health Care Guarantee here, and I think this is the section that is being mentioned above:

Therefore, the Committee recommends that:
For each type of major procedure or treatment, a maximum needs-based waiting time be established and made public.
When this maximum time is reached, the insurer (government) pay for the patient to seek the procedure or treatment immediately in another jurisdiction, including, if necessary, another country (e.g., the United States). This is called the Health Care Guarantee.
The Committee realizes that governments may well take the position that if a patient does not receive timely access for a medically necessary service, and hence becomes entitled to service elsewhere under the health care guarantee, the responsibility (or blame) may rest with the hospital or its physicians for not being sufficiently efficient in the use of existing resources and not managing waiting lists well enough. Under these circumstances, the government may well seek to recover the costs incurred through the care guarantee from the hospital and/or the physician(s) concerned. That is, governments may well place the responsibility for meeting the maximum waiting times on the shoulders of those responsible for actually managing the system. This is reasonable if it can be shown that underfunding is not the sole or even the primary cause of a patient waiting too long for a service.
.....
The Committee believes that it should be possible for the federal and provincial/territorial governments to reach agreement on a national set of maximum waiting times for various procedures. It passionately hopes that it will not be necessary for unilateral action to be taken by the federal government or for a parallel system of private delivery, financed by private insurance, to emerge as a result of judicial decisions. The Committee has pointed to these potential consequences of not implementing the health care guarantee only because it categorically rejects the status quo: Canadians in need of medically necessary services must be given timely access to them.

There's a lot more there.