Desperate Canadians criticized for considering health care outside Canada
Here’s my piece about the hypocrisy of politicians berating patients, who consider care out of country when they cannot access care in Canada. Published in National Post Mar 13, 2024. Enjoy!
An Ipsos poll for Global News revealed last week that 42 per cent of Canadians would personally pay to travel to the United States for health care, if necessary. This is a 10 percentage point increase from 2023.
Federal Health Minister Mark Holland promptly scolded the 42 per cent.
Holland asked Canadians “to be patient.” He said we will “get through these health workforce issues.” It is not clear how “workforce issues” explain why 6.5 million Canadians cannot find a family physician.
Leaving aside Holland’s woolly thinking, his comments just seem heartless and cruel. Canadians do not seek care outside Canada on a lark. They’re desperate.
Canadians are underinsured. Canadian governments nationalized medical insurance companies between 1968-1972. With nowhere else to go, patients must moulder in queues with a median wait of 27.7 weeks to see a specialist.
Having nationalized private medical insurance companies and then put people into waiting lines, politicians berate the desperate few who step out of line and flee south for care.
Minister Holland echoes what elites have been saying for decades. In the 1990s, the associate deputy minister of health in B.C. was asked how she felt about patients on waiting lists looking for care in the U.S. She said, “If we could stop them at the border, we would.”
The hypocrisy becomes especially rank when we consider how many of our elected elites have been escaping Canada for care themselves for decades.
Robert Bourassa, then premier of Quebec, had melanoma surgery in Bethesda, Md., in 1993. Danny Williams, then premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, had heart surgery in Miami, Fla., in 2010. Former Liberal member of Parliament, Belinda Stronach, had breast cancer surgery in California. The late Sen. Ed Lawson, former Canadian trade unionist, also had surgery in the U.S. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien used government aircraft to fly to the Mayo clinic.
The list of elite medical refugees who flee Canada is long and include many of the same people who refuse to change the medicare status quo.
Speaking on 900 CHML, Sean Simpson of Ipsos suggested Canadian interest in cross-border care simply reflected a “post-pandemic world” in which we began to see that medicare was “threadbare.”
But Canadians were fleeing Canada to find care long before the pandemic. In 2019, the Second Street think-tank used Statistics Canada data to determine that more than 217,500 Canadians had left the country for care in 2017. Hospitals in the U.S. advertise to Canadians, eager to meet growing Canadian demand. Patients can buy books to guide them on their quest for surgery abroad, for example: Medical Tourism – Surgery for Sale! How to Have Surgery Abroad Without It Costing Your Life.
But so what? Tasteless comments and elite hypocrisy make us angry, but if wait times are unavoidable, all we can do is stick together and weather the storm, right?
Wait times are not like natural disasters. They are not random. Wait times are created by professional managers.
Dr. Charles Wright, former vice-president at Vancouver General Hospital and wait-list consultant to the BC Ministry of health, said, “Administrators maintain waiting lists the way airlines overbook. As for urgent patients in pain, the public system will decide when their pain requires care. These are societal decisions. The individual is not able to decide rationally.”
Or as a former deputy minister of health of Ontario puts it, “We have waiting lists for some procedures as a means of better organizing our system.”
In other words, patients would not need to wait at all, if elites chose otherwise.
Minister Holland’s comments of last week betray a deep distrust of patients and their ability to make decisions for themselves. Patients should be patient. They should stand in line; wait for care. But as Canada’s foremost health economist, Bob Evans, has explained, the “rational consumer” is a “highly dubious assumption.”
Canada is changing. Last week’s Ipsos poll also found 63 per cent support for private health-care options. Most Canadians do not mind the Toronto-area Highway 407 toll road if it frees up space on the (public) Highway 401 without making it any worse.
Medicare must reform; the status quo is crumbling. While we wait for reform, let’s stop berating desperate patients, who consider leaving Canada for care when wait times grow too long.
Good for thought. Thanks as always Shawn.
*Food for thought.
But good works too 🤔
Thanks Darren! Sure appreciate you taking time to read and post (twice!).
Well Shawn ….. Canada has become a theater of the absurd, in many ways.
Re:health care,I believe the tide is finally, albeit slowly, turning.
The proponents of the centralized non functioning bureaucratic monopolistic non system Canada has are dwindling in numbers.
Leftist doctors (Doctors for Mediocrity(Medicare)),unions, politicians still cling to the ideology and continue to virtue signal while pragmatic Canadians are increasingly exploring other options. Hopefully, they will soon demand those options closer to home.
My new tablet remembers my most common writings which makes it easier to repeat my most common missive :
We desperately need a European hybrid health system. 🙂
People really like hybrid cars.
Just sayin’ 🤔
🙂
Too funny, Ram — yes, you have been consistent with your messages! Sure appreciate that.
It seems I’m on talk radio at least once a week these days about Canada’s appetite for change. For example, here’s a 10-minute clip from Shayne Ganam’s show this morning.
People love universal care: everyone gets care. This is not radical. It just means everyone gets medical insurance.
What IS radical is having government be the only insurance provider. (And then allowing government to change insurance into managed care)
I have another post out tomorrow on a piece I wrote for The Hub challenging Conservatives on their messaging about freedom. They say they believe in freedom, but does that include healthcare?
Thanks for commenting!
Listened to your radio clip from this am.
Suggesting cautious change seems the Canadian way …. agree.
With interprovincial competition/innovation,and improved service,maybe THEN repeal of the CHA to really kickstart reform.
There’s my surgical personality trying to get to the pathology in a direct fashion.
Please keep fighting the good fight Shawn ….
Love the surgical approach — debride the wound!
Thanks for listening to it. I’m becoming less cautious — more provocative? — in simply calling out what needs to happen. This is risky. Suggestions can fail. We do not have a crystal ball. But we can at least have courage and pursue honesty.
Thanks again!
Politicians are fearful for their own political careers , if they were to do the right thing and permit targeted Private Care in Canada. It will happen. It will happen when politicians can blame “others” for what is obviously necessary. “Others” of course represent everyone providing health care “Others” are currently burned out and disillusioned trying to handle the consequences of a dysfunctional system. My suggestion to Politicians; “Tell The Truth” . The truth highlights the inability of a pure public system to handle all conditions , for all people ,always in a timely manner , especially given the aging demographics of society. This, of course is not possible. So, we need politicians to do two things … first of all be honest and secondly to have the courage to act on the truth. The problem as I see it … where are the honest and courageous politicians. ( An extinct species currently) It is time to elect honest, courageous, and honourable people. It is important to have an honest public discussion regarding the need for a mixed public/private system. We need to accept that market economics should be part of the discussion (if this is ignored, there will be a chronic deficit of skilled professionals…they will simply go elsewhere) So … where do we find honest, courageous politicians?
Honesty. Courage.
Charles, you’ve nailed it. We need people who are willing to say what might end their political careers.
Those of us who have dared to say the Emperor has no clothes have willingly ended our careers in public administration, as it exists currently. (I suppose it wasn’t much of a sacrifice, however. 🙂 )
Thanks for posting!
Excellent as usual. Hypocrisy continues to be alive and well in Canadian medical bureaucracies. You do an excellent job of conveying the appropriate and balanced information. There is little else one can add to your insightful perspective on this and other issues. Thanks for all that you do.
Thank you, Allan!
If we keep speaking up, it seems to slow the stream of nonsense (at least I believe it does). If we never speak up, the nonsense snowballs quickly!
Sure appreciate you taking time to share some encouragement — thanks again.
I was going to mention Robert Bourassa’s US surgery but then I saw that you had remembered it too.
Very cool, Gerry. Thanks for looking at it so closely.
I suspect many more have procedures done outside Canada, but they have become very cautious in letting anyone know about it!
Great to hear from you.
Thanks for an excellent read as usual!
I have to really wonder if our colleagues are truly bleeding heart altruists or just stupid. This may again get me flagged at CPSO 😂
It was the root of my ill tempered comments made on a certain Ivory tower physician’s letter supporting the funding cuts the previous liberal government wanted to implement in 2016, whom you will recall, stated MDs made too much and should be happy as we were essentially 1%’ers. Well, this time my rants will be much more astutely direct and frankly unambiguous in English only.
When we see patients willingly pay $75 to see a NP at a privately run NP clinic, we don’t say “hey stop that!”
We need to say “hey, can we join you?”
When we hear our radiology and ophthalmology colleagues bill 7 digits we need to stop saying “hey, bring them down!”
We need to say “hey, bring us all up!”
Four fox snakes!
Thanks for the BP lowering exclamatory verbiage. 😜
Ozzy
😀
Ozzy — you made me smile (as you often do!)
I couldn’t agree more. I’d call it small-mindedness. Cutting others down does not improve our own lot, and it definitely does not help patients.
As Tom Sowell said, the social justice movement turns envy, a traditional vice, into a social virtue. That never ends well.
Great to hear from you! Loved your post.
Cheers