Even here, the pharmacy is peppered with a bunch of extra hanging "pharmacy" signs. This must be some sort of BC requirement, but it just looks so weird! This store was built during the era of Walmart's medical clinic experimentation, which seems to have come to an end with a lot of the ones that were built having shut down and new ones no longer opening (as far as I've seen). I'm a bit surprised that they tried that concept in Canada, which has a mostly functional health care system compared to the US.
I suppose the Canadian Walmart clinics aren't too much of a surprise in the sense that Canadian health care providers, especially at the family doctor level, are generally private business, much like the US. Covered medical care is billed directly to the provincial health insurance systems without a co-pay.
ReplyDeleteOutside of the UK, Scandinavia, Spain, and Portugal, which use a Beveridge model system, most countries in Europe have private healthcare providers as well, though the structure differs by country and some countries like France and Germany are notoriously complex in terms of their structure in terms of public and private health providers and healthcare coverage. A lot of these Bismarck model countries are looking more and more like the US healthcare system by the year. The national insurance model system Canada uses is less complex than the Bismarck model systems most of Europe uses, but Canada's system is more complex than necessary in the system that the insurance is offered at the provincial level rather than the national level.
My understanding is that the Canadian Walmart clinics are operated by other companies which specialize in running private health clinics in Canada. This partnership benefits Walmart as the clinic can steer patients to the Walmart Pharmacy. I'm not sure if Walmart themselves get any cut from revenue gained from billing the provincial governments for covered health services, but obviously that is how those private clinics make their profits, just like how US private clinics make their profits mostly from billing Medicare and private insurance.
Studying comparative national health systems is a hobby of mine, so don't worry if this is too much information to digest in one sitting, lol.