Dr. Danielle Martin sees the cracks and challenges in our health care system every day. A family doctor and national media commentator on the health issues that hit closest to home for Canadians, Dr. Martin speaks with passion on our national health-care system, defending and defining the ways we can make it even more worthy of our immense national pride. Dr. Martin has just released her new book, Better Now: Six Big Ideas to Improve Health Care for All Canadians, and CTV’s Your Morning sat down to speak with her about it:
A doctor who was praised for her calm defence of universal healthcare when she spoke before a powerful group of U.S. politicians in 2014 has written a new book outlining her vision for improving the quality of Canada’s health care system.
Nearly three years ago, Dr. Danielle Martin made international headlines after calmly and succinctly defending universal care when she testified at U.S. Senate sub-committee hearing examining Obamacare.
Video of her testimony went viral on YouTube, with more than 1.4 million views. Martin has since been named one of Canada’s most powerful doctors by The Medical Post.
With her new book, “Better Now: Six Big Ideas to Improve Health Care for All Canadians,” Martin is on a mission to bolster health care and reduce wait times across the country.
The six ideas outlined in Martin’s book are:
- Ensure every Canadian has regular access to a family doctor or other primary care provider
- Bring prescription drugs under medicare
- Reduce unnecessary tests and interventions
- Recognize health care delivery to reduce wait times and improve quality
- Implement a basic income guarantee to alleviate poverty, which is a major threat to health
- Scale up successful local innovations to a national level
“I’m a family doctor working in the system every day, so I see the challenges and the cracks that my patients experience as they work their way through the system,” Martin said on CTV’s Your Morning Wednesday. “But I think we’ve been stuck in a conversation about, ‘is the system good or is it bad? Is medicare worth preserving or do we just get rid of it?’
“And I think that that has stopped us from really focusing on the conversation we should be having which is, ‘How do we make it better?’”
One of Martin’s ideas is ensuring that every Canadian has regular access to a family doctor or other primary care provider.