Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Hosipital Wait Times and Paying Taxes



Yesterday morning as I was eating my breakfast and wandering through the various on-line news sites I came across the following headline on CBC "Patients' 'lives ruined' as hip surgery waits grow"(CBC). According to the article, people are having to wait not just months but years to have a defective hip replaced. I can only imagine not only the discomfort (medical term for it hurts like hell), but also the frustration of having to wait for what now seems to be a fairly common operation and the dislocation of one's life while you wait. I suspect that I would be fairly outraged if I was in that position. For a number of years people in Canada have been complaining about the lengthy wait times for such operations and for almost an equal number of years various provinces have been promising to do something about it. Clearly if said provinces have tried to fix the problem they have been unsuccessful. Or have they?

It was not difficult to find accurate and current statistics as to the number of hip replacements being done on an annual basis (something sadly missing from the CBC article). Canadians had approximately  23,000 hip replacements in 2007 (Stats). That was twice as many as were done ten years earlier (ibid). "In 2012–2013, there were 47,137" (CIHI) hip replacements. In other words it appears as if the number of hip replacement done in Canada doubles every nine or ten years. To put it another way: in 2012-2013 Canadian hospitals did four times as many hip surgeries as they did in 1995. Given the number of baby boomers who are approaching 65-70 and who are all potential recipients for hip replacement surgery and the increasing number of younger people who are also requiring them, it is easy to predict that the number of surgeries will double in the next ten years.

The cost of such an operation appears to change a little bit depending upon which province, but in BC, each hip replacement costs an estimated $13,100 (canada.com). Which means tax payers in Canada paid approximately $617,494,700 for all of hip replacement surgeries done in 2012-2013.  In all likelihood, we will spend more next year and even more the year after etc.etc.

In 2013 it was projected that Canada would spend $211 billion on health care. That is approximately double of what we spent in 1995 (CIHI). While there is some suggestion that that rate of health spending growth is slowing down or at least stabilizing (CTV), there is no doubt that Canada will continue to spend a sizable percentage of its GDP on health care. But it equally as clear that it is not enough if people are having to wait extended periods of time to get needed surgeries.

To reduce the costs one could cut the salaries of doctors and nurses (although I am not sure if I want the person holding the knife to be irritated at the system), we could raise more money through taxes, we could allow those who can afford it to arrange for the operation to be done privately or we could employ the evermore frequently used Canadian strategy of whining about poor service and demanding that someone else pay for it.

There was a time when most Canadians had a general awareness that for the system to work everyone needed to pay into it. That awareness seems to have been lost. Too many Canadians  are content - no eager - to rant and rail against the government and its inefficiencies. It has become too easy for all political parties to argue that taxes can be reduced and service maintained by just "tightening our belts" a  little bit. It is time we realized that if we want to have a good health care system (and a good educational system and etc. etc.) then we need to pay for it up front. My heart goes out to all of those who are in a long waiting line to get the necessary surgery, but I think the question needs to be asked: how many of them  would have voted for higher taxes to pay for the services they now demand?

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