Unfortunately, we are increasingly hearing stories of long rural medical wait times forcing patients to seek care elsewhere, often at significant personal cost. Let’s take a recent example. milburns After years of waiting for knee surgery, the Manitoba residents are considering selling their home and moving to Alberta just to potentially shorten the public waiting list.
Manitoba patients can expect to wait a median of 29 weeks to see an orthopedic surgeon after a referral from their primary care physician, but they still have to wait a median of 24.4 weeks to receive treatment. yeah. In other words, the typical wait time for orthopedics in this state totals 53.4 weeks, which is more than a year. This is a median, meaning some patients may end up waiting longer.
Unfortunately, the Milburns are unlikely to receive more timely treatment than being on Alberta’s public waiting list. The total median waiting time for orthopedic care in Alberta was 64.1 weeks, which was actually longer than in Manitoba. This also does not include the time it takes for state insurance to become effective for new state residents or the time it takes to find a new primary care physician and receive necessary tests, scans, and referrals. yeah.
For more timely treatment, the Milburn family is left with enviable options. Because they are covered by Manitoba’s public health insurance, it is difficult for them to pay for covered medical expenses out of pocket. limited. However, you can pay for and receive treatment privately in another state as an uninsured visitor (meaning you do not have to live there permanently). Specifically, certain states have “waivers” that allow doctors to directly bill out-of-state patients for the cost of performing these procedures privately.
Alternatively, the Milburns could leave Canada and travel further from home to receive timely care abroad.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Canadians don’t have to pay long waits for universal health care. In fact, Canada is one of 30 high-income countries with universal healthcare. Other countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia have much shorter wait times. For example, only 62 per cent of Canadians report having access to non-emergency surgery within a year. 4 months In 2020, compared to 99 percent of Germans, 94 percent of Swiss and 72 percent of Australians.
difference? These countries approach healthcare in fundamentally different ways than we do. One notable difference is the attitude towards the private sector.
In Germany, patients can remain insured by the public system and seek private medical care, or opt out and enroll in regulated private insurance. These approaches (universal, privately paid or privately insured) can provide prompt care. Switzerland only requires patients to purchase private insurance in a regulated but competitive market as part of its universal system. Low-income households receive subsidies, allowing them to participate on a more equal footing in a competitive market and get the coverage that best suits their needs.
Perhaps the most direct comparison to Canada is Australia. Not only because of its geography, but also because it relies on a universal health care system that is largely funded by taxes. However, unlike in Canada, individuals can have private insurance that covers (among other things) the treatment they receive as a private patient in a public or private hospital, or they can also pay directly for private treatment if they wish. In 2021/22, more than two-thirds (70%) of non-emergency hospital admissions (both publicly and privately funded) involving surgery took place in private facilities.
Of course, these more rapid-access countries have adopted universal policies, such as requirements to share the costs of patient care and to fund hospitals based on activity (rather than Canada’s outdated bureaucratically determined budgets). • They share other differences in attitudes toward health care policy. However, the crucial difference is that in none of these countries, patients are generally not prevented from paying privately for their medical expenses in their home state (or states).
Without fundamental reforms, cases like Milburn’s will continue to rise as the state system continues to struggle to provide basic non-emergency care. Without reform, many Canadians will continue to be forced to make similarly absurd decisions to get the care they need, rather than focusing on treatment and recovery.
