Despite often being labelled as free, a spokesperson with the right-leaning think tank, Fraser Institute, says health care in Canada is actually quite expensive, especially for the quality of healthcare Canadians are receiving in return.
Nadeem Esmail says the average Canadian two-parent, two-child family spends nearly $18,000 on health care annually through taxes. “Since 1997, the cost of health care insurance to the Canadian family has grown by 240 per cent, while their average cash income has grown by 142 per cent, which means health care is growing 1.7 times faster than the average income, 1.6 times as fast as the cost of housing, and about double the cost of food.” Esmail suggests Canada has one of the world’s most expensive universal access health care systems, yet Canadians receive some of the worst access to health care in the developed world among nations with those systems. “The reality is, there are 30 high-income developed nations with universal access health care systems, and 29 of them do it very differently from Canada. In fact, the most successful ones, in terms of access to services and short waiting times…and the best outcomes from the health care process, do health care policy very differently than we do in Canada.”
He notes that not all universal health care is delivered the same. “By following the examples of countries like Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, we find health care systems with a larger role for the private sector in provision and in financing, competitively, and we find some cautionary measures for patients, where you have to pay a small fee to access the health care system to encourage users to make a more informed decision on when and where it’s best to access the healthcare system.”
He adds that no developed nation with a universal access health care system has followed the Canadian model, and those that were close to it have moved further and further away. Esmail says the Canadian health care system has produced new record highs for wait times and under-delivers when it comes to access to physicians, medical technologies and hospital beds.
