GOLDSTEIN: Critical reports show Canadian health care on life support

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If every government in Canada — federal and provincial — is treating health care as a priority, then why is the system irretrievably broken, year after year?

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It’s not that there aren’t individual success stories and dedicated medical professionals doing good work, but report after report suggests this is happening in spite of the system, not because of it.

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Most of all, why does nothing ever get better, despite decades of studies documenting the same problems over and over again?

This week alone, four studies documented major problems with Canada’s health-care system, all of which were made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, but all of which have been issues for decades.

A Fraser Institute study released Thursday reports that median wait times for medical treatment across 12 specialties in 10 provinces this year are the highest they’ve ever been in the three decades during which comparable records have been kept — 27.7 weeks from a referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist.

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That’s up from 27.4 weeks last year and 198% longer than in 1993 when it was 9.3 weeks.

A report by SecondStreet.org released Wednesday found that, based on partial data from the provinces, at least 17,032 patients died in Canada while waiting for surgery or diagnostic tests between April 1, 2022 and March 31, 2023 and that the total number could be as high as 31,397, a 64% increase over the past five years.

A report by the Ontario Auditor General on four aspects of the province’s health care system also released Wednesday found:

* 200 unplanned emergency department closures in provincial hospitals between June 2022 and June 2023 because of a shortage of doctors and nurses in 23 hospitals, mainly in rural, remote and northern Ontario locations.

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* wait times for treatment in emergency rooms are increasing, along with hallway medicine.
* staff in long-term care homes lack critical training, plus there aren’t enough of them to ensure patient safety and quality care.
* Public Health Ontario is struggling with inefficiency in its labs and poor coordination of public health research in areas such as latent tuberculosis and wastewater testing for COVID-19.

A study released by the Ontario Health Coalition Tuesday reported 1,199 temporary or permanent closures of hospital services this year up to Nov. 24, resulting in the loss of 31,055 hours of patient care, the equivalent of 3.44 years.

A report by the Ontario College of Family Physicians last month said that last year, 2.3 million Ontarians didn’t have a family doctor, which will increase to 4.4 million by 2026, a major reason hospital emergency rooms are overwhelmed by patients who could be treated by a family doctor if they had one.

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A report released by the Fraser Institute last month comparing Canada’s health-care system to those of 29 other developed countries with universal health-care systems, who are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, (excluding the U.S. which doesn’t have universal health care) found that in 2021:

Canada ranked 28th out of 30 countries for the number of doctors (2.8 per 1,000 people); 23rd out of 29 for the number of beds dedicated to physical care (2.3 per 1,000); 25th out of 29 for MRIs (10.3 per million people) and 26th out of 30 for CT scanners (14.9 per million).

Among 10 comparable universal health care systems that measure medical wait times, Canada’s were the longest, with the lowest percentage of patients waiting four weeks or less to see a specialist (38%) and the lowest percentage waiting four months or less for elective surgery (62%).

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While more money (which federal and provincial government claim they don’t have) may be needed in some areas of health care, money alone isn’t going to fix the problems.

Adjusted for age — the percentage of the population over 65 — Canada ranks highest for expenditures on health care as a percentage of GDP among 30 OECD nations, and ninth-highest per capita.

The public cost of Canadian health care last year was $331 billion or $8,563 per Canadian, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, with health care consuming about 40% of provincial budgets and accounting for 12.2% of Canada’s GDP.

Given all this, it’s painfully obvious that Canada’s health care system, based on the myth of “free” health care, is broken and that we need to start seriously studying what other developed countries with universal health care are doing right that we’re doing wrong.

Or nothing will ever change.

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