October 4, 2024
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Despite objections from defenders of today’s unworkable status quo, there’s in fact a way to improve Canada’s health-care system while preserving its universality. However, until we’re willing to pursue that path, wait times and their associated costs will continue to burden Canadian patients and their loved ones.

Canadians face serious economic costs due to health-care wait times

We hear a lot about how much money we must spend to simply maintain the status quo in health care, with billions of new dollars from Ottawa just to keep the same system afloat.
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).

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