Drifting Away?: The Case of the Canada Health Act

Abstract

<p>Most analyses of welfare state reform show that the radical retrenchment of social programs is rare in advanced industrialized countries. But more recent studies argue that despite widespread path dependence, welfare state institutions frequently undergo significant policy drift: even though their formal structures remain largely stable, they increasingly fail to achieve their institutionalized goals, thus creating growing disparities between policies and outcomes. In this paper, drift in the Canadian health care system is explored through the application of this theory to the Canada Health Act. This study has identified two forms of drift, policy and regulatory. These types of drift have developed in the absence of adequate updating and upholding. As a result of the drift that is occurring, the implementation of the existing principles embodied in the Canada Health Act has decreased significantly during the past two decades.</p>