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Health care free, with delays
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| Contributor | None Entered |
| Last Edited | None Entered Mar 30, 2005 11:53pm |
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| Category | General |
| Media | Newspaper - Seattle Times |
| News Date | Sunday, March 20, 2005 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | A letter from the Moncton Hospital to a New Brunswick heart patient in need of an electrocardiogram said the appointment would be in three months. It added: "If the person named on this computer-generated letter is deceased, please accept our sincere apologies."
The patient wasn't dead, according to the doctor who showed the letter to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. But there are many Canadians who claim the long wait for the test and the frigid formality of the letter are indicative of a health system sorely in need of emergency care.
The average wait for surgical or specialist treatment is nearly 18 weeks, up from 9.3 weeks in 1993, according to the Fraser Institute, a right-wing public-policy think tank in Vancouver. A Fraser study last year said the average wait for an orthopedic surgeon was more than nine months.
Americans who flock to Canada for cheap flu shots often come away impressed at the free and first-class medical care available to Canadians, rich or poor. But tell that to hospital administrators constantly having to cut staff members for lack of funds, or to the mother whose teenager was advised she would have to wait up to three years for surgery to repair a torn knee ligament.
"It's like somebody's telling you that you can buy this car, and you've paid for the car, but you can't have it right now," Jane Pelton said. Rather than leave daughter Emily in pain and a knee brace, the Ottawa family opted to pay $3,300 for arthroscopic surgery at a private clinic in Vancouver, with no help from the government.
"Every day we're paying for health care, yet when we go to access it, it's just not there," Pelton said.
The average Canadian family pays about 48 percent of its income in taxes each year, partly to fund the health-care system. Rates vary from province to province, but Ontario, the most populous, spends roughly 40 percent of every tax dollar on health care, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
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