Medical Bills

The Canadian Health Care system is always under attack.

Our American neighbours are forever pointing to wait-list horror stories as proof that our system is on the verge of total collapse, and critics at home advocate increasing for-profit privatization as the only solution for our woes.

Give me a freaking break.

Let's looks a few indicators of success or failure in health care. I gleaned all these figures from the site nationmaster.com, and they get their data from the American CIA Factbook. This is not left-winger data in any way.

Let's look at life expectancy, infant mortality, and hospital beds per 1000 citizens, and compare them between Canada and our southern neighbour.

Life expectancy at birth;

Canada 81.07 (we live 2.43 years longer)

USA 78.64

Infant mortality per 1000 births;

Canada 4.82

USA 7.0 (45% higher)

Hospital beds per 1000 citizens

Canada 3.7

USA 3.3 (10.8% fewer)

Doesn't all that look interesting; but at what cost? Everybody knows that our publicly-funded system must be massively bloated. Indeed, per person, it costs us $1826 per year, and that's not all. We also average $709 per year of private funding. Our total bill is $2535 per person.

Sounds like a lot, but what do they pay in the USA? Surprisingly, they spend more per person on public health care funding than we do in Canada. They spend $2051. That's 12% more than we do.

Then, of course, there is the bill for their private sector medicine. That comes to another $2580 for every man, woman and child. That's more than is spent in-total for all medicine in Canada. Their total private-plus-public funding costs them $4631, which is over 82% more than it costs in Canada.

Do the earlier figures on life expectancy, infant mortality, and the number of hospital beds the funding provides seem to indicate that they are using all that money wisely?

I would say that they indicate exactly the opposite.

However, it is true that we have wait lists in certain categories that are not being adequately addressed.

Here's my solution. We should increase the amount we spend on publicly funding of healthcare. For the sake of argument, let's say we increase it to the same level that our good neighbours spend on their own public system. If they can afford to spend 12% more than we currently do, surely we can increase funding to that same level. That would do a lot to clear up those unfortunate wait lines.

There are many things that the USA does very well, but health-care funding isn't one of them. Copying them in this field isn't the way to go.