Let’s look at some healthcare news across Canada from West to East. In BC, cancer patients have been sent to the US for treatment as local facilities are overwhelmed. In Alberta, patients languish in hospital hallways as hospital capacity in the province is reported to be at 150%.In Saskatchewan, patients are being sent to Alberta for diagnostic services and surgeries as their public systems are overwhelmed.In Ontario, hospital emergency departments have been experiencing rotating closures for lack of resources.In Quebec, conventional hospitals are reported to be at 100% capacity while children’s hospitals are at 150%. Parents are being urged to seek home treatment for their sick kids.In Nova Scotia, the waitlist for finding a regular family doctor has grown to 150,000. I skipped some provinces and didn’t go into every healthcare issue but I think you get the picture.The Fraser Institute recently released its annual report on health care waiting times in Canada and the picture is bleak. The median wait time for treatment after having been referred to a specialist by a general practitioner in Canada has climbed to 27.7 weeks. That’s assuming a person managed to find a general practitioner in the first place.How many people die during the wait to see a specialist? How many conditions end up becoming untreatable because people spent too much time waiting for diagnosis or treatment?Imagine the suffering while waiting for months for a painful condition. How many new addicts are created daily due to being prescribed opioids while awaiting treatment? Canada’s healthcare system is failing in every jurisdiction and in every possible way across the country. While there are modern facilities staffed by fantastic professionals in every province, they just can’t keep up with demand. Waiting lists for every type of medical service are growing and people are dying while waiting for care.While opposition politicians in every province try to score political points by blaming the party in power, they are missing the mark. Whether it’s an NDP, UCP, PC or CAQ government, the situation is the same everywhere. Every province has dramatically increased healthcare spending in the last few years and the federal government has consistently increased healthcare transfers to provinces. Canada is one of the highest-spending countries on earth when it comes to healthcare and it is among the worst countries when it comes to providing access. If funding isn’t the cure for the healthcare crisis, then the problem must lie with the system itself. Canada’s healthcare system is hopelessly broken. Unfortunately, it has become politically taboo to point that out and politicians are terrified to take on the healthcare unions and bureaucrats. It’s beyond time they set aside their fears and called out the system.Some premiers are trying to do what they can within the system but they will inevitably fail. They are doing patchwork repairs on a blown engine that needs to be torn down and rebuilt.Danielle Smith has taken on the local bureaucracy and is decentralizing the administration of healthcare services. Her efforts will likely lead to some improvements and better efficiency, but they will be hampered by Canada’s inflexible Health Act.In a monopoly situation, whether in private industry or government services, the consumer always loses. Citizens are consumers of healthcare and they are forced by law to deal with only one provider. The only other nations that illegalize private healthcare that way are North Korea and Cuba and that speaks volumes.Canada’s healthcare monopoly system makes it impossible for provinces to create real and lasting fixes to the system. Unions and bureaucrats fight every effort to make changes while costs keep climbing and efficiency drops. The only way to change this intractable cycle is to scrap or reform the Federal Health Act and bring some new options into healthcare.While Canadians constantly list healthcare as one of their top issues of concern, they have been trained to fear any changes to the system aside from the injection of more funds. Unions and activists decry any effort to improve the system as “Americanization” and it's effective in frightening voters away from supporting change.Canadians need to be educated. They need to realize there are dozens of universal healthcare systems in the world and most of them are functioning better than ours. Politicians need to immediately dismiss the two-dimensional argument that only the American and Canadian systems exist. Political leaders need to turn the discussion to European and Asian models that are outperforming us. Private healthcare provision is not a bad thing and the world provides a plethora of evidence to back it.Fearmongering has dominated the narrative and allowed Canada to become so collectively stupid on the issue, citizens won’t even glance at models that are proven to provide better care than the current system. Things are sure to get worse with healthcare in Canada until the system itself is rebuilt. The only question is; how bad will things have to get before Canadians understand this?
