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Canadians face serious economic costs due to health-care wait times
The irony, of course, is that maintaining the status quo imposes some of the harshest costs on Canadians. Last year, Canadians could expect to wait an average of 13.1 weeks to receive treatment after receiving a specialist consultation. Not only was this wait more than two times longer than in 1993, it resulted in an estimated 1.2 million procedures being waited for across the country.
And at one month longer than the wait doctors consider reasonable, these delays are not benign. In fact, they can produce devastating physical and psychological consequences.
While it may be tempting to blame our current predicament on the aftereffects of the pandemic, in reality, long waits were the norm long before COVID. In fact, in 2019 the wait between a specialist consultation and receiving care was nearly two-and-a-half weeks less than today, and the number of procedures being waited for (1.1 million) was slightly less than the number today (1.2 million).
