Manitoba Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen says they didn't get the commitment they were looking for.

Provincial health ministers met with the federal Health Minister Tuesday in a meeting that focused on securing long-term funding. Goertzen explains at the beginning of Medicare, it was a fifty-fifty cost sharing agreement between the provincial and federal governments. Today, the federal government funds less than twenty-five per cent of health care costs to some provinces.

"I don't expect, that the federal government is going to turn around tomorrow and go back to a historical position of fifty-fifty cost sharing on health care, although perhaps maybe many Canadians already believe that that's the case," says Goertzen.

But Manitoba's Health Minister says we are a long way from where it started and as long as the percentage being contributed by the federal government does not drop even further.

Goertzen says there isn't a health minister across Canada who is not feeling the pressures of trying to ensure that every dollar is used well and to look for savings. But he says sometimes you have to play the cards you are dealt.

"As a new government these are the cards that we were dealt with where there has been not as much focus as I would have liked or I think our government would have liked in looking for cost savings and cost containments within the health care system," he says.

Goertzen notes his government has made strides in trying to turn the corner, yet there exists a tremendous amount of needs driven primarily by the issues surrounding chronic disease. For example, the minister says that while kidney failure rates in Canada have stabilized, Manitoba has the highest rate of kidney disease in the country. In addition, end-stage kidney disease prevalence and the need for dialysis are two to three times higher in Manitoba's Indigenous populations compared to other groups.

According to Goertzen, provincial health ministers did not get the commitment Tuesday they were looking for from the federal health minister. However, he is hopeful the Prime Minister will respond to the request by the premiers to have a premiers meeting on the issue of long term sustainable, predictable and flexible funding.

Meanwhile, Goertzen says his provincial counterparts discussed the opioid crisis in Canada. Goertzen says opioid addiction seems to be moving dramatically from west to east, though Manitoba is seeing high amounts as well. He notes health ministers have agreed to meet at a summit in Ottawa next month.