According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), the median wait time for priority procedures in Canada in 2020 was 16.8 weeks, up from 10.9 weeks in 2019. Priority procedures are defined as procedures that are clinically necessary, but their delay could result in the patient's condition becoming more serious.
However, wait times vary widely depending on the province or territory and the specific medical facility. In 2020, the median wait time for priority procedures ranged from 10.6 weeks in Quebec to 32.9 weeks in Prince Edward Island. Even the median wait time for cancer-related surgeries was 4.8 weeks. Patients are often forced to travel to a different province to try and get care more quickly.
This is a summary of the current situation from the Mises Institute:
Currently, there are approximately 1.2 million Canadians stuck on a government waiting list for healthcare that they need. This is a death sentence for many of them, as it has been for thousands of patients who have gone before them. ...
Patients who endure considerable suffering as they languish on a waiting list—where many of them die—cannot be seen to have been given reasonable access to health services in the government’s Medicare system. The government also prevents them from having reasonable access to a private healthcare option.
Thus, reasonable access is an obvious deception, with benefits flowing to highly paid, power-hungry politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators wanting to maintain control over massive, inefficient healthcare bureaucracies at the federal and provincial levels. This deceitful behavior fits the definition of fraud and should be prosecuted as such.
Thousands of Canadians die while they wait for the care that the government promised to deliver when they needed it. ...
If politicians were personally accountable for the damage they caused, guess what? They wouldn’t cause any damage! However, we cannot hold them personally accountable because equality under the law does not exist in a democracy.
In the private sector, you are accountable for your own actions. If you break your neighbor’s window, you pay for the replacement. If you are a politician and you break the window in the course of performing your official duties, you can charge the cost of the new window to taxpayers....
When citizens demand better service, politicians respond by saying, “Okay, but that means we have to take more of your money.” So, taxes are raised, more bureaucrats and administrators are hired, and the inefficient Medicare bureaucracies that politicians and bureaucrats regard as their personal fiefdoms grow ever larger. That’s why healthcare is the single largest item in many provincial budgets. ...
