Sheryl Ubelacker, Health Reporter, THE CANADIAN PRESS

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TORONTO - Canada's ailing medicare system is in need of aggressive treatment, says the head of the Canadian Medical Association, which is planning a fact-finding mission to Europe to see up close and personal how other countries deliver health care.

CMA president Dr. Robert Ouellet will lead a small team to Britain, Denmark and France starting next month, with the intention of presenting a blueprint next year to overhaul Canada's publicly funded universal system.

"What we want to know is what went wrong and what is good in their transformation - the good things and the bad things," Ouellet said of health-care reform in other countries.

"We're not ready to say: 'This is what we should do. ... We really think this needs to change, but we will fine-tune our project after coming back from those countries."

But Ouellet, who in August took over as president of the country's largest doctors group, makes no bones about his belief that the private sector should have a role to play in shoring up Canada's publicly funded system.

"What I see is a complementary role," Ouellet said in an interview Tuesday following a speech to the Canadian Club in Toronto. "I don't want to privatize the health-care system in Canada. And one thing is for sure: we need to keep it universal, meaning that if someone doesn't have money they shouldn't be denied care."

But the radiologist, who owns and operates five private imaging clinics in Montreal, said allowing a regulated private sector to provide patient services could help resolve problems such as long wait times that continue to plague the publicly funded system.

In France, for instance, 60 per cent of surgeries are performed at private centres and paid for through a mix of government and private health insurance. He said patients there wait only two weeks for a hip replacement - compared to many months in Canada.

Ouellet said Canada should also follow Britain's lead and tie health-care funding to actual care provided to individual patients, rather than giving hospitals overall block funding.

"This gives an incentive to do more or find ways to be more effective," he said.

But Dr. Danielle Martin, chair of Canadian Doctors for Medicare, said introducing the private sector into the public system would undermine the principle of universal care and likely increase wait times - at least for some Canadians.

"What would almost certainly happen is that access would be undermined for people who can't afford to pay for their health care," the family doctor, who splits her practice between Toronto and Northern Ontario, said from Geraldton, Ont.

As to the CMA looking to other countries as models, Martin said "it's really a dangerous game to pull one little thing about a health-care system out in isolation."

"We're not talking about a controlled experiment here where you can change one variable and hope that everything else will remain the same. Everything's got a ripple effect when you make a change to the health-care system."

Catherine Mayers, a spokeswoman for the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario, said her organization would oppose any move to create a hybrid health system that would marry private and public services.

"We strongly reject any measures that would weaken the country's medicare system," she said.

Mayers said Ouellet's call for patient-focused funding in Canada would likely be a bad way to go. She said even the British Medical Association is questioning whether the funding system should have been adopted in the U.K., because it has ended up increasing health-care costs.

"And we're going to go there and see if we can model after them?" she said of the CMA's plan to look at Britain's health-care reforms. "We're a little wary of that."