B.C. woman’s plight underscores need for urgent health-care reform

While it’s important to remain grounded in data when measuring wait times for health care, it’s also important to remember the tragic nature of delayed care.

Take the recent case of Tara Matthews who, faced with a two-year wait for a consultation with a neurosurgeon in British Columbia, had to resort to a GoFundMe campaign to get treated abroad in a more timely manner. Sadly, wait times data suggest there are millions of untold stories of patients stuck on waiting lists across Canada.

According to a recent report, patients in B.C. faced a median wait of 27.7 weeks between referral from a family doctor to treatment across 12 specialties. And although Tara faced a remarkably longer wait time—partly due to the complexity of her case—overall, patients in the province faced a 34.8-week wait to receive neurosurgical treatment.

Of course, this is not just a B.C. problem. Across Canada, patients were waiting for an estimated 11,000 neurosurgery treatments. And when all the specialties were combined, that number jumped to 1.2 million procedures.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Long wait times are not the necessary price for universal health care.

Indeed, another survey by the U.S.-based Commonwealth Fund found that, compared to Canada, patients in other universal health-care countries such as Switzerland and the Netherlands face significantly shorter waits for consultation with specialists and treatment.

Whereas in 2023 (the latest year of available data), about one in 10 Canadians (9.6 per cent) reported waiting more than one year for a specialist compared to only 0.8 per cent in Switzerland. And while one in five Canadians (19.9 per cent) reported waiting more than one year for treatment, no patient in the Netherlands reported facing a similar wait. Canada fared worst on both indicators compared to the eight other countries with universal health-care surveyed.

The difference? The top performers do universal health-care differently.

In the Netherlands, for example, residents must purchase insurance from private insurers in a regulated—but competitive—market. In Switzerland, patients are generally expected to share the cost of treatment through (among other things) a 10-20 per cent coinsurance rate (with exemptions for vulnerable populations). And in both countries, and indeed the majority of high-income countries with universal health care, hospitals are generally funded according to their activity.

Canada, by contrast, has yet to fully embrace private insurers for medically necessary care, effectively bans patient cost-sharing, and clings to an old and outdated model of hospital funding that relies on bureaucratically determined budgets that are disconnected from the services hospitals actually provide.

The result? Canadians, including Tara Matthews, face a choice of either waiting for care while their condition deteriorates or getting on a plane for treatment elsewhere.

Again, it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s time Canada’s leaders built up the courage to challenge the draconian restrictions on how health care is funded and delivered in this country and learn the many lessons from abroad where universal health care is more than just lip service.