Parallel lines do intersect: interactions between the Workers' Compensation and provincial publicly financed healthcare systems in Canada

The authors of this paper use a case study approach to document and analyze the interactions that arise between two healthcare payers in Canada: the provincial public healthcare insurance plans and the provincial workers' compensation boards. Through a documentary review and semi-structured key-respondent interviews, the study identified a set of policy events and decisions undertaken by each payer that had consequences for the other. These events, which included changes to governance, funding and service delivery within each system, generated interactions transmitted through the political, institutional and economic environments (primarily through competition for the same resources) and cross-system learning. The two payers currently lack a formalized process by which to consider such spillover effects and to coordinate policy between them. These interactions, and their associated consequences for both payers, raise important policy challenges and, more generally, provide insight into the dynamics of parallel systems of healthcare financing