Healthcare: When We Get Around to It
By: David Turcotte
Tags: Healthcare, Canada, Accessibility, Finance, Medicine

Healthcare: When We Get Around to It

A Look into the Healthcare System of Canada

Canadian Flag and Caduceus, edited from Wikipedia

This is Canada. We’re the great white North, so named for our often frigid climate and our annual deluge of snow. We are familiar with goose-down coats, and we call our popular winter snow caps “toques”. Canada is globally renowned for hospitality, a propensity for apologizing, the liberal use of the term “eh”. We are also known for our brilliant healthcare system. Yes. If you come to Canada, we will help you out, eh.

Articles from the US making comparisons with the Canadian healthcare system are common, and Canadians come out on top. The US system leaves a lot to be desired. It’s pay-per-use. It’s expensive. Out-of-pocket pay for health insurance is mandatory. Even with insurance, a visit to the family doctor will still come with personal cost, and a trip to the emergency room can cripple a person financially. In Canada, this still happens. It doesn’t happen in the same way or at the same rate as in the US, but it does still happen.

The real issue with the Canadian system comes later. Yes. You can take an ambulance to the emergency room because you are unable to stand and walk. You can get an examination, free of immediate personal charge. Then you can be discharged after receiving a couple anti-inflammatories because the hospital is too full to accept you right away. You can’t stand or walk, but it’s not an emergency in our emergency rooms. That’s something for later.

Wait times are not reserved for the waiting room. Specialists have an average wait time of 19.6 weeks (Frasier Institute, 2018). This leaves a lot of room for people to fall through the cracks. In psychological terms, this would be a form of delayed gratification, which can be used to reduce the likelihood of repeated behaviors. In fact, Statistics Canada reported wait times as the top reason people give for difficulties accessing health care (2016). Wait time is a critical factor in health care.

You can’t stand or walk, but it’s not an emergency in our emergency rooms. That’s something for later.

I remember 2008, December. I planned to spend the holidays with my nephew. Instead, I found myself waiting in a hospital emergency room. I made my way in, crawling. I couldn’t stand. Security told me to sit in front of a triage nurse, “Go wait in the waiting room. Lie down in a chair or on the floor if you can’t sit.” I waited six hours, unable to move. A man came in on a stretcher. He had a massive head-wound. His head was wrapped and packed. I watched the nursing staff replace his bandaging, twice, in the waiting area. Each time, blood would run down his face into his blood-soaked shirt. They took me before him.

The nursing staff had to take me on a stretcher from my spot in the waiting room into my spot in the emergency room. The hospital used to have staff for lifting, rolling, and general transportation tasks, but they were long gone due to cutbacks. They rolled my stretcher into an area curtained off from the rest of the world and told me I shouldn’t wait any longer. I was virtually secluded and isolated. I waited.



The doctor arrived after about four hours more. I was on the stretcher, lying on my front. The doctor seemed baffled. He said there was nothing he could do. He offered me some pain killer and sent me off to find a taxi. At 5AM on Christmas morning in 2008, no taxis were available. I crawled back home.

Wait time is a critical factor in health care.

My own story has another visit to the emergency room on the last day of December, flowing into New Year’s Day. During that visit, they gave me a narcotic and a taxi chit. One of the nurses said, “That’s what you people come for anyway.” They thought I was a drug chaser.

Canada, we can do better. Why are our front-line medical staff starting with the assumption of drug chasing instead of sending patients to have x-rays or tests? This presumption is calculated. Everything associated with hospitals has a cost. While we claim to have universal healthcare for our citizens, government sources fund 76% of healthcare costs (Health Canada, 2016). This leaves the public sector with a bill for 24% of the costs. This money is raised through campaigns led by hospitals, paid parking, galas, cafeterias, gift shops, and solicitation letters. Without private charitable funding, hospitals could not exist as they do. Hospitals use the same cost vs benefit analyses employed by any other business.

It may be time Canadians start demanding more from our over-taxed system. In 2016, 63,000 Canadians left the country for medical services we should have been able to provide (Frasier Institute, 2017). The solution may be to increase the number of private clinics within Canada and use the taxes generated by those clinics to fund the public clinics. As of 2015, there were 6,705 Canadian doctors operating in the US (Freeman, et al, 2016). If we can give them with the choice to operate their own private clinics in Canada, we would be giving the doctors, people, a choice in how to live their lives without leaving the country. This would keep more doctors in Canada, lessen the burden on the public system, increase the number of Canadians seeking treatment in Canada instead of leaving, increase tax revenue to be applied to the Canadian public health system, and reduce the dreaded wait times.

Canadians, we can do this.

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