A 20-year-old university student in Montreal with appendicitis spent 15 hours waiting in the Royal Victoria Hospital’s emergency room before travelling all the way to Kingston for treatment.
Twenty-year-old Concordia University Christos Lianos was advised by his parents—who subsequently drove from their hometown of Kingston to Montreal—to go to the hospital after he began experiencing severe abdominal pain and high fever in mid-June.
His parents eventually joined him in the Royal Victoria Hospital’s emergency room, but after waiting 15 hours, receiving only Tylenol every six hours, his parents complained they could have driven their son three hours to Kingston and already received care.
The nurse told them to go right ahead.
Upon arrival at Kingston General Hospital, they learned Lianos’s appendix burst and, after having it removed, he spent the next 10 days in hospital, mostly in intensive care.
“If I had gone home or stay for, who knows how long in that waiting room, what could have happened to me? Lianos told the CBC. “Would I be here today?”
Canadians are all too familiar with these horror stories when it comes to the healthcare system. Even after the Covid-19 pandemic, the system’s struggles continue and governments of all levels have attempted to fix the problem with additional funding.
Earlier this month, the Trudeau government earmarked $2 billion for the provinces and territories to spend on their emergency and operating rooms, and pediatric hospitals.
It will be up to provinces to decide how that money is allocated.
However, medical professionals told True North the latest funding amounts to a drop in the bucket, and Canada needs more private options in order to alleviate the stress on Canada’s public healthcare system.
Dr. Brian Day, medical director of the Cambie Surgery Centre in Vancouver, and a past president of the Canadian Medical Association, says Canadian healthcare had been dysfunctional for decades before the Covid-19 crisis.
He points to Canadian healthcare’s consistently poor ranking with the 105-year-old Commonwealth Fund, which advocates for high-performing, and accessible, healthcare.
He contends the government has monopoly on the country’s healthcare thanks to the Canada Health Act prohibiting private options, and that competition in the form of a public-private hybrid system would improve service.
“I’m an advocate for competition with the private sector. I’m completely supportive of public health, but no other public health in the world performs as poorly as Canada’s, in terms of cost,” Day told True North.
“I want a system like what Norway or Denmark or Holland, or even Sweden, have. None of them outlaw private healthcare. They all understand state monopoly is not goof for consumers in any field. Whenever you have monopoly, they don’t serve customers well because they don’t care about customers.”
Of all the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) 38 members, Canada is the only country that’s outlawed private health.
Private insurance for hospital and physician services is illegal in six of the 10 provinces, while the remaining four—New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan—have populations too small to develop any substantial private sector.
Newfoundland is the only one that allows doctors to work in both public and private health.
The pandemic exacerbated the family doctor shortage—which had, for years, resulted in painful ER wait times for years—when a lot of clinicians opted for early retirement.
Day warns baby boomers are entering their twilight years and younger generations are going to pay for their healthcare costs via massive expansion of public debt. But it’s a problem of the government’s own making, he says.
“The reason there’s a shortage of doctors and nurses is in the 1990s governments across the country decided they’d cut down because too many doctors and nurses were treating too many patients, and it was costing too much, so they closed down 30% of medical schools across the country,” he said.
Dr. Ed McNally, a Kingston-based family doctor is skeptical about the government’s latest funding, claiming that $2 billion is a “drop in the ocean.” While dubious the hybrid system would improve service, he agrees that the public system is flawed.
According to Day, more than 13,000 Canadians die every year on public wait lists and that something has to change because public health is deteriorating.
“It’s against the law for them to bypass public wait lists,” he said. The main difference between our system and Holland’s, Norway’s, Denmark’s, New Zealand’s, is we don’t have competition for the public system. Monopolies don’t serve customers well and we see that in the way governments across the country handle their systems.”
According to a survey, only 18% of Canadians believe the country’s healthcare system is “working well,” which is a 35-year low, while 54% said changes are needed.
However, 28%—a record high—said the system is in crisis, a marked increased from no more than 10% between 2010 and 2016.
Commonwealth Fund’s 2021 report compared healthcare systems in 11 high-income countries—the others were Australia, France, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States—and Canada ranked 10th, only ahead of the U.S.
The OECD reported that wait times for elective surgeries—such cataract surgery, hip and replacements—in Canada has steadily increased over the past nine years.
The Fraser Institute reported that wait times in the country’s healthcare system were 27.4 weeks in 2022, the longest ever recorded, and 195% longer than the 9.3 weeks Canadians waited 30 years ago when the institute began tracking medical wait times. The previous record was 25.6 weeks in 2021.
