Canadian Patients Feel Wait Of The World

A group in British Columbia has offered medical waiting-list insurance to members whose government treatment is on hold — another example of why state-run health care must be avoided.

Canadians have a health care system that should be the envy of no one. It’s not free, it’s funded by taxpayers, and it isn’t truly universal. Two Canadian Supreme Court justices made this clear three years ago when they concluded that “access to a waiting list is not access to health care.”(…)

It’s hard to understand why an elected official, or anyone else, would knowingly trap people in a system that can’t take care of the public it is expected to serve. Yet there are many Canadians who would, in the name of “fairness” and “equality,” deny others’ right to take care of themselves outside of the collective. They are outraged that some of their countrymen could escape the agony of the waiting lists while others languish in the bureaucratic wreckage.

But the real outrage, to quote Brian Day, former director of the Canadian Medical Association, should be that a government would actually force “a citizen in a free and democratic society to simply wait for health care, and outlaw their ability to extricate themselves from a wait list.”(…)

Meanwhile, Canadians keep waiting — and waiting. The Fraser Institute in Canada reports that the median wait time from a general practitioner’s referral to actual treatment by a specialist was 17.3 weeks in 2008 (see chart). That’s a full week better than the previous year, but far worse than a decade and a half earlier when the wait time was 9.3 weeks.

Despite the decline from 2007 to 2008, the long-term trend indicates that wait times will continue to grow. It’s a discouraging pattern that the U.S. will follow if Washington forces any kind of government care on this country.