American progressives look up to Canada’s health care system.
For people like avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, health care is a right, and a single-payer system like Canada’s–where the state is the sole insurer–consecrates such a right.
However such a right comes with many downsides, including long waiting lists and a diminished quality of care.
These are two of the reasons why over 52,000 Canadian patients traveled abroad to get health care in 2014, according to the Fraser Institute.
That’s a 25 percent increase from the previous year, where an estimated 41,000 people traveled to get health care.
...Indeed, Fraser’s report also states that “patients could expect to wait 9.8 weeks for medically necessary treatment after seeing a specialist, [more] than 3 weeks longer than what physicians consider to be clinically ‘reasonable’ (6.5 weeks).”
This waiting was such a problem in the 1990s that many provinces, including my native Quebec, had to send hundreds of patients to the U.S. in order to alleviate oncology waiting lists. It cost three times more to do so because provincial governments also paid for temporary housing.
..Right to care doesn’t mean one gets itNotwithstanding this exceptional case, Quebec and Canada perform rather poorly in health outcomes.
In fact, those outcomes are inferior to those measured in the U.S.
For example, remission rates for breast and prostate cancer are higher in the U.S. than Canada, and the at-risk population doesn’t get preventive screening as often in Canada.
It’s easy to understand why: it’s Economics 101 at work.
Since medical care is “free” in Canada–making up about 50 percent of provincial budgets–governments have to ration care in order to control costs...waiting times are dangerously long in the E.R.–an average of 17 hours, compared to eight hours in Utah.
That is, of course, unless one has the right connections..."
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