title: Introduction to the Special Issue: Precarious Solidarity-Preferential Access in Canadian Health Care.
abstract: Systems of universal health coverage may aspire to provide care based on need and not ability to pay; the complexities of this aspiration (conceptual, practical, and ethical) call for normative analysis. This special issue arises in the wake of a judicial inquiry into preferential access in the Canadian province of Alberta, the Vertes Commission. I describe this inquiry and set out a taxonomy of forms of differential and preferential access. Papers in this special issue focus on the conceptual specification of health system boundaries (the concept of medical need) and on the normative questions raised by complex models of funding and delivery of care, where patients, providers, and services cross system boundaries.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioethics, Dalhousie University, PO Box 15000, Halifax, NS, B3H 4R2, Canada. Lynette.Reid@dal.ca.
authors.forename: Lynette
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3709-5061
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Reid
mesh_terms: D002170:Canada; D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D019472:Universal Health Insurance
keywords: Health equity; Health insurance; Health policy; Preferential access; Queue-jumping; Universal health coverage