The report on the state of our country’s health care system released by the Fraser Institute last week is a bitter pill to swallow. The gist of the report was that despite increased spending by government on the health care system, the improvement in the delivery of timely treatment has been negligible. In fact, the overall average time between a patient seeing a general practitioner and being treated by a specialist has decreased by only one day, which is a devastating condemnation of the efficiency of public healthcare in Canada.
I did not require the report from the Fraser institute to know that our healthcare system has gone to hell in a hand basket, as I was in the unfortunate position of experiencing this deterioration first hand. a year ago I woke up with severe pain in my right knee. I shrugged it of as something that would correct itself, given the human body’s propensity for healing itself. However, after a month, the pain had grown in severity and showed no signs of abating.
I was referred to an orthopedic surgeon by a general practitioner, which involved a three-month wait, which I now know was unusually short. I was also able to get an MRI done in record time (only 3 days!), as there is a clinic that runs seven days a week, 24-hours a day at Toronto’s Mt. Sinai hospital and they had a cancellation they could not fill on a Sunday night at 9:00 p.m.
a month later, I was back in the office of the surgeon, who informed me that I had a torn meniscus tendon. He explained that being extremely conservative, he wanted me to try physiotherapy to see if the condition improved. It did not. I then went back to the surgeon who told me that the most effective treatment for this type of injury was an arthroscopic surgical procedure. He asked his secretary to book an appointment for me to be operated on and she said that I would be hearing from the hospital’s surgery department "within a couple of months" to determine a date for the surgery.
Three months later I still hadn’t heard from the hospital and by now I had developed a permanent limp, so I began harassing the surgeon’s secretary with weekly telephone calls asking if she’s had any word about a surgery date. I was lucky in that I was called about six weeks later to be told that a cancellation made a spot available within a week and could I take it. I readily accepted with a feeling of great relief, anticipating the cessation of pain once the procedure was complete. The total waiting time between the visit to the general practitioner and the surgery was 8 months. What’s worse, the procedure did absolutely nothing to improve my knee. In fact, the condition has actually worsened and I am currently waiting for an appointment to see the surgeon again to see what can be done.
I’m also seriously considering a trip to the U.S. to see an orthopedic specialist there, knowing that I could get treatment in less than a week.
and we make fun of the americans!
I’m not saying that Canadians are morons, mind you, but I am wondering why as a country we allow ourselves to be in this position, when other countries that are as liberal as Canada have healthcare available to its citizens with a minimum of waiting time. What’s more, I don’t understand how a huge part of the debate concerning healthcare can be prohibited, as the idea of introducing private, for profit healthcare as an adjunct to the public system is so shunned as to even prohibit a discussion of that possibility.
I recall that back in 1984 when the Liberals forced the current version of the Canada Health act upon us, doctors and other healthcare professionals took to the streets in protest. Back then the issue was about "extra billing" as some physicians would bill patients an additional two or three dollars for an office visit in addition to what was being paid to them under the public system. The Canada Health act prohibited this extra billing, as well as billing for any service or procedure covered under the public system.
One of the protest placards that appealed to me and which had an eerie prescience read, "If you like Canada Post, you’ll love the Canada Health act". The eerie prescience of this poster was eerie only in that it wasn’t prescient enough. Canada Post is providing infinitely better service to the country than our public healthcare system is currently providing. In addition, it isn’t costing us billions more to have this improved level of postal service. But then, Canada Post does get a fee from the public for use of its services, which is specifically tied to how extensively the service is used.
With publicly provided healthcare, we just keep shoveling billions into the system with no discernible improvement in the timeliness or quality of the service. In fact, if an additional four billion dollars shortens our waiting times from 180 to 179 days, then it stands to reason that it would take an additional $716 billion dollars to bring the waiting time down to one day. But not even our famously incompetent health minister, Ujjal Dosanj, would go so far as to admit this might be true, as there aren’t enough qualified healthcare professionals in Canada to shorten the wait times, even if we did inject the additional billions. The "cost cutting measures" of various provincial governments have seen to this by reducing and limiting enrolment in medical schools with the rationale that if you limit the number of doctors, then you can reduce the cost of healthcare. Of course, the Canada Health act has contributed through an exodus of doctors to the U.S., where the law does not limit a doctor’s income.
I don’t know about you, but I’m mad as hell. I don’t care about gay marriage or multiculturalism or any of the other shibboleths that are supposed to define Canadians in Liberal terms. I do care that some fat cat thieving politician has the power to determine how much pain is acceptable for how long for people who need medical care. That’s an even bigger crime than adscam.