Canada shows why universal health care is a bad idea
Sen. Bernie Sanders would do well to look at what’s happening across our northern border before he tries to advance legislation that would import Canada’s single-payer health care system, where the government is the only insurer. The new chairman of the influential Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, he’s made clear that he’ll use his position to make the case for “universal health care.”
The Canadian health care system, which serves just 38 million people, is in crisis. It is no model for the United States (with our 334 million people).
Dozens of Canadian emergency rooms closed their doors last year due to staffing shortages. Those remaining open are so strained that patients routinely spend over 40 hours in the ER before being admitted to the hospital. In Alberta, patients wait for hours on ambulances to be transferred to understaffed emergency rooms.
Waits for non-emergency care are best expressed in months, not days or weeks. The median wait for treatment from a specialist following referral by a general practitioner is over six months, according to research published in December by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank.
Such waits for care are endemic to government-run healthcare systems. The reason comes down to the law of supply and demand.
In Canada, health care is “free” at the point of service. As a result, demand for care is sky-high.
But the government does not have unlimited resources. It effectively limits the supply of care by capping what it will spend — and directing providers to make do within those constraints. The result is rationing and agonizing waits for routine treatment.
Patients are suffering the consequences. More than 8,400 Canadians died while waiting for treatment between April 2019 to March 2020.
Many Canadians can’t find a doctor who will see them. A recent survey of 104 towns and cities in British Columbia found that one-quarter of them did not have a clinic accepting new patients. More than 6 million Canadians do not have a primary care doctor, even though one-third report searching for more than a year.
It’s not just doctors Canada is lacking; it’s hospital beds and medical equipment, too. Canada has just two acute care beds for every 1,000 citizens — a ratio that places it at the bottom of a list of comparably wealthy countries.
Advanced medical technology is also scarce. Our northern neighbor has just 10 MRI machines and 15 CT scanners per million people. The United States has 38 MRI machines and 43 CT scanners per million people.
These shortages are the manifestation of underinvestment by Canada in its healthcare system. Just 10.85% of the country’s GDP goes toward health care — compared with nearly 17% in the United States, according to World Bank data.
Public health insurance does not come cheap. Fraser estimates that the average Canadian family of four pays nearly $16,000 in taxes for its government health coverage.
Provincial governments are demanding more money from Ottawa to try to relieve some of the pressure. But with national healthcare spending totaling $331 billion last year, even liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been reluctant to earmark more money for health care. “There’s no point putting more money in a broken system,” he admitted in December.
Yet progressives in the United States continue to press for Canadianstyle health care. This past November, voters in Oregon ratified a new constitutional right to “cost-effective, clinically appropriate and affordable health care.”
That’s not all that dissimilar from the law in Canada, which stipulates that the country’s primary health policy objective is “to facilitate reasonable access to health services without financial or other barriers.”
It is not fulfilling that mission. Millions of Canadians could tell Sen. Sanders’s committee how their healthcare system has failed to deliver on its promise of universal access to care. Unfortunately, the senator is not likely to give them that chance.