Waiting in Canada
Emergency room waits for people with serious conditions sometimes reached 12 hours or more, the report said. That is far greater than the province’s 8-hour wait time target… And for emergency patients who need a hospital bed, they waited on average for about 10 hours but some waited 26 hours or more.
Pointer from Megan McArdle.
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Get ready for similar waits in this country.
Not a pretty picture.
Every doctor I’ve talked to is predicting two-tiered medicine. Those who can afford it will have concierge service. Everyone else will wait
We’ve been hearing about these waits in Canada for years. But the left wing US media just ignores the facts.
When we looked at hospitals in Canada (and Britain for that matter) for our book, Lives at Risk, is was quite common for hospitals to fill beds with “bed blockers” (i.e. long term care patients) who were far cheaper to treat than someone who needed acute care. That guaranteed there were never a bunch of free beds to fill with costly patients. I suspect the practice is still done.
On Monday, one of Toronto’s newspapers carried an article about a woman who died in an ER near Toronto. She kept saying she couldn’t breathe. They kept ignoring her.
The article noted the auditor’s report, saying that Ontario had spent $C200 million on reducing ER waits with, zero measurable positive results.
The US is about to spend a lot more than $C200 million on a health plan. Unfortunately it appears that this spending will have measurable results and they will all be negative.
The Ontario report must be wrong. They must not have read that the government guarantees equal access to medical care.
Just kidding.
What is important here is that the report is from the Auditor General of Ontario. The law giving him authority to audit the province’s waiting times was not passed willingly.
The Fraser Institute, a private non-profit institute where I used to work, started measuring and reporting waiting times years ago. At first, the provincial governments ignored them. Then they denied them. Then they had to accept them. Then they caved in decided to pretend to take responsibility for them.
Unfortunately, they have never accepted that they need to surrender their monopoly on people’s access to medical services.