Statistics Show Canadian Healthcare Is Inferior to American System
By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Those who would have the U.S. government play a larger role in healthcare like to point to Canada as an example the United States should follow. Their argument, in sum, is that healthcare there is of high quality, is readily available and, because of generous government subsidies, much cheaper. In fact, most Americans know little about the inner workings of the Canadian system other than the anecdotal evidence provided by both sides of the debate. A look at the hard data, however, suggests there is more support for the arguments put forward by the critics of the Canadian system than by those who see it as a model for the United States.
Working off data compiled by The Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank, the GOP staff of the congressional Joint Economic Committee assembled this chart to show in visual terms how long Canadian patients have to wait to receive essential healthcare services:
For example, the median clinically reasonable wait time before receiving neurosurgery is 5.8 weeks. In Canada in 2008 it was 31.7 weeks. For gynecology it's 5.6 weeks v. 16.1 weeks. And for internal medicine is 3.3 weeks v. 12.5 weeks. Fraser's hospital waiting list survey measures median waiting times to document the extent to which waiting times for visits to specialists and for diagnostic and surgical procedures are used to control health care expenditures. The report measures the wait times between seeing a general practitioner and a specialist, the time between seeing the specialist and receiving treatment, and the total wait time.
The good news, if there is any, is that Fraser's 2008 study (and they have been collecting data on wait times for 18 years) indicates the median wait time for those patients seeking surgical or other therapeutic treatment is down by a full week—from 18.3 weeks in 2007 to 17.3 weeks in 2008. Despite the improvement, however, the Fraser data shows many Canadians are still waiting almost four months (121 days) or more before they can receive treatment.
As the JEC chart indicates, the grass may not be greener over the northern U.S. border.
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Tags: Canada | healthcare
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Reader Comments
Totally Useless
Um, Where is the U.S. data? You compare Canadian wait time to what is a "Reasonable Wait Time".. but not to the U.S.
Totally misleading, and terrible journalism.
Wow
Well, I am a MD/PhD in Health Care Delivery Systems and have been educated in both Canada and the United States. First off, this article is is totally slanted. MacDonald et al (1998) state that using wait times as a measure of a health care system is extremely misleading and unethical. Secondly, his sources he used (Fraser Ins.) is a highly motivated (biased) research group that does not release their research methods to any reporting agency (health systems) and recently stated their research methods were randomly selected phone calls to physicians across the country. This is what you call bad research. No researcher in the world would use this data to compare wait times. Moreover, Canada has ranked one of the best countries in the world consistently for years on health outcomes, life expectancy, quality of life, infant mortality rate. By the way, the Fraser Institute report actually stated that the wait times in Canada have improved dramatically and that wait times to not play a contributing role in overall health outcomes (Health Canada, 2007; NIH, 2006; Hall et al. 2006). Canada pays out of taxes on average $484/year. Estimates for Americans can be in the thousands. But most importantly, the WHO ranks the united states as the worst industrialized nation in terms of health outcomes and worse than some developing countries. Hard to believe, but unfortunately, it is true. I worked in both systems as a physician and researcher. This is not a Canada vs. US thing, it is simply most countries have a higher standard of living across a population because more people are educated, lower socio-economic factors, high income, thus, higher health outcomes (France, Germany, Italy number 1,2,3 health care systems in the world).
The unfortunate part is that bad policy dovetails the issue of access for uninsured in US, higher costs, and shrinking providers. event hough Canada has better health outcomes and higher quality, neither system compares to the top three countries mentioned above.
My opinion now: It is unfortunate that this article has been written, this man did not read the report by the Fraser institute and most likely went to an American University with a low standard of education (which costs 1000s).
National Health Care
To start I don't think I should have to pay for the people who don't have jobs or the one who choice not to work cause their lazy and want the government to take care of them.
yes pvt insurance can be costly. but so are the taxes that are going to go in to play to pay for this. NOTHING IS FREE in the world.
those that support this health care are just blinded by the smoke and mirrors the government is using. and no i am not Republican but I am not a Democrat either.
do some research USA think for yourself for once
Shawn I have yet to be declined an services with my pvt insurance here in the US. to be honest in 2004 my Doctors ran a battery of test to find out why I was loosing the feeling on the left side of my body and the ability to be able to walk with out assistance. they ran more test then what was needed. and I wasn't out that much money. I had 4 CT scans in 3 weeks and 10 MRIs in 6 weeks 4 of which were done on the same day at two different MRI centers.
My Private insurance paid for 95% of the cost and I wasn't out any money up front.
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