2014 Award Recipient Jeffrey Simpson

Mr. Jeffrey Simpson, author of Chronic Condition: Why Canada's Health Care System Needs to be Dragged into the 21st Century

 

At its 16th Annual Roundtable Meeting held April 17, 2014 the HCCC was proud to present the inaugural Award of Distinction to Mr. Jeffrey Simpson. Mr. Simpson has given many talks to emphasize the importance of updating Canada's health care system, one of many reasons that made him an outstanding choice for HCCC's Award of Distinction.

In 2012 Jeffrey Simpson wrote Chronic Condition: Why Canada's Health Care System Needs to be Dragged into the 21st Century. The health care system, which costs about $200 billion a year in public and private money, cannot continue as it is—increasingly ill-adapted to an aging population with public costs growing faster than government revenues. In Chronic Condition, Jeffrey Simpson meets health care head on and explores the only four options we have to end this growing crisis: cuts in spending, tax increases, privatization, and reaping savings through increased efficiency. He examines the tenets of the Medicare system that Canadians cling to so passionately. Here, he finds that many other countries have more extensive public health systems, and Canadian health care produces only average value for money. In fact, our rigid system for some health care needs and a costly system for other needs—drugs, dentistry, and home care—is really the worst of both worlds. Chronic Condition breaks the silence about the huge changes and real choices that Canadians face. In addition to authoring the book, Simpson has given many talks to emphasize the importance of updating Canada's health care system.

 As a well-known author, speaker and journalist, he has focused attention of the public, politicians and policy-makers on the health care system and the need for supporting and reforming it. Jeffrey Simpson has been The Globe and Mail's national affairs columnist for almost three decades. He has won all three of Canada's leading literary prizes — the Governor General's Award for non-fiction book writing, the National Magazine Award for political writing, and the National Newspaper Award for column writing. He has also won the Hyman Solomon Award for excellence in public policy journalism and the Donner Prize for the best public policy book by a Canadian.

In 2006, Simpson was awarded the Charles Lynch Award in recognition of his outstanding coverage of national issues. In January, 2000, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has written numerous magazine articles for such publications as Saturday Night, Report on Business Magazine, the Journal of Canadian Studies and Queen's Quarterly. He has spoken at dozens of major conferences in Canada and internationally on a variety of domestic and international issues. Mr. Simpson is a frequent participant in political debate on radio and television, in French and in English. He has been a guest lecturer at such universities as Oxford, Edinburgh, Harvard, Princeton, Brigham Young, Johns Hopkins, Maine, California plus more than a dozen universities in Canada. He was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University, a Skelton-Clark fellow and Brockington Visitor at Queen's University, a John V. Clyne fellow at the University of British Columbia, a distinguished visitor at the University of Alberta and a member of the Georgetown University Leadership Seminar. He has been awarded honorary doctorates of laws from the University of British Columbia and the University of Western Ontario. Simpson has been a member of the board of trustees at Queen's University; the board of overseers at Green College, University of British Columbia; the advisory board of the Review of Constitutional Studies at the University of Alberta; the editorial board of The Queen's Quarterly, and the Canadian Consortium for Asia-Pacific Security at York University and the University of Toronto. He has been vice-chairman of the City of Ottawa Library Board. Simpson is a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He is also a member of the Trilateral Commission.

He is the author of 8 books. In addition to Chronic Condition: Why Canada's Health Care System Needs to be Dragged into the 21st Century, he authored: 1980 - Discipline of Power, winner of the 1980 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. 1988 - Spoils of Power 1993 - Faultines, Struggling for a Canadian Vision 1996 - The Anxious Years 2000 - Star-Spangled Canadians 2001 - The Friendly Dictatorship 2007 - Hot Air: Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge (co-authored with Mark Jaccard and Nic Rivers)

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