It sucks to be sick in Canuckistan

from the National Post

The wait continues

Canada's federal and provincial governments spent $86-billion on our public health care system in 2003, $91-billion in 2004 and are on pace to expend $98-billion this year. Yet as the Fraser Institute demonstrated this week, all this new spending has bought just a one-day reduction on average wait times for medical treatments. At this rate, it would take an additional $744-billion each year -- about 60% of Canada's total GDP -- to reduce waits to zero.

Fraser's annual Waiting Your Turn report, released Tuesday, shows that the marginal costs required to improve our government health monopoly outweigh the benefits they produce. The problem is not a lack of funding in the public system, but rather the monopolistic nature of the public system itself. The system's incentives are all wrong: Patients are seen not as clients to be served, but as drains on the overall budget; care is rationed and postponed to match the annual amount allocated to treatment and centralized decision-making limits competition and stifles innovation. So unless and until a healthy dose of private care is injected into the system, we are unlikely to see much improvement.

More than three-quarters of a million Canadians -- 2.5% of our total population -- are awaiting treatment of some kind, and 85% of them will wait longer than their doctors believe is clinically "reasonable." They risk having their conditions worsen just because our public system can not deal with them fast enough.

Ironically, the worst waits are in Saskatchewan, birthplace of our national medicare scheme. While the province dramatically lowered its average delays this year -- by 7.8 weeks -- Saskatchewanians still had to sit nervously by for an average of 25.5 weeks. A staggering 5.3% of the provincial population is on a waiting list, too.

[...]

It has been six months since the Supreme Court ruled that Canadian governments could not stop the development of a parallel private system in Canada. Yet our federal and provincial governments are still too timid politically to begin experimentation with private health care or even, in many cases, private delivery of public care.

This intransigence has to end, and now. Canadians are suffering unnecessarily -- and in some cases dying -- because their governments cling to the outdated shibboleth that only government is capable of providing fair care to all.

My bold