In 2021, when the U.S.-based Commonwealth Fund ranked health-care systems across developed countries, they found that Canadians were gettingon their health care dollar. Only the Americans were paying more for medical treatment and getting less in return.
“Maybe we do need to spend more, but we definitely need to spend it differently,” was how Paul Woods, a former president and CEO of London Health Sciences Centre,Plenty of countries have socialized medicine, but nobody is quite as uptight about it as Canada. The usual way to offer universal health care is to offer a guaranteed public option with a choice of private insurance for citizens who want health care that is fancier or faster.
The Canadian health-care system is thus the most centrally planned component of the entire economy, and it isn’t behaving all that differently from any other sector if it was subjected to such overarching top-down control., but legions of administrators shouldn’t be all that surprising for a system in which the government demands a monopoly on how every doctor, nurse, MRI and stethoscope is allocated.
Needless to say, the Canadian health-care system in 2022 is a different beast entirely. Just as the Olympics keeps cramming in new sports, Canada keeps expanding the list of treatments deemed “medically necessary”: Elder care, family therapy, rehab and more than 60 types of specialties. Thanks to recent advocacy by the NDP, that list is now on the fast track to include dental care.
Again; basically every country on Earth has spent the last few decades vastly expanding the scope of their health care systems (French postnatal care, for instance, now includes a rehabilitation program to
It won’t hurt it either