Canada
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EDITORIAL: Medicare is broken and it’s time to fix it

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Feb. 1, 2023.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Feb. 1, 2023. Photo by Blair Gable /REUTERS

For decades, Canadian politicians of all stripes promoted myths that our health-care system was “free” and “the best in the world.”

But when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the premiers meet Tuesday to negotiate a new deal for funding health care, they will do so knowing those myths are dead.

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Today, even Trudeau acknowledges the system is “broken” and that without fundamental reforms, simply pouring more money into it will not address its failings.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland acknowledged in last year’s budget that: “While Canada spends more of its gross domestic product on health care than the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average —10.8% vs. 8.8% — the Commonwealth Fund ranks Canada behind peer countries, such as Switzerland, France, Germany, U.K. and Australia, in both access to care and in health-care outcomes.”

Five million Canadians don’t have a family doctor. Hospital emergency rooms are routinely overwhelmed by patients. Hallway medicine has become the norm.

We have too many government bureaucrats and too few nurses.

A study by the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute reported that the median wait time for medically necessary, non-emergency, treatment in Canada last year across 12 medical specialties was 27.4 weeks, 195% higher than 9.3 weeks in 1993 and often far beyond what doctors recommend for the best clinical outcomes.

Even in 2019, the year before the pandemic hit, the median wait time was an unacceptable 20.9 weeks.

As then-chief Supreme Court justice Beverley McLachlin famously observed in a 2005 court case: “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care.”

Canada ranks 28th out of 30 OECD countries in the number of doctors (2.8 per 1,000 people); 23rd out of 28 in acute care beds (2.2 per 1,000); 22nd out of 29 in psychiatric beds (0.38 per 1,000); 26th out of 29 in the number of MRI machines (10.3 per million people).

Trudeau is right that the provinces must account for how they will spend increased federal funding.