Since the early 1960s, Canada’s population has more than doubled, rising from 18.2 million in 1961 to 36.6 million in 2017. Meanwhile, per capita spending on health care during that same period has increased more than sixty times — it was less than $100 per person in the early 1960s while it is a whopping $6,604 per person in 2017.
In 1961, 57 percent of health care in Canada was privately funded, while the rest was covered by government. Today, roughly 70 percent of health care is funded by the government, leaving approximately 30 percent to be covered by the private sector. At the same time that government coverage of health costs has been increasing, Canadian life expectancy has also increased. Over the past fifty-plus years, it has risen from sixty-eight (males) and seventy-nine (females) in 1961 to eighty (males) and eighty-four (females) today, while infant mortality rates, considered by many to be a key indicator of how healthy a country’s population truly is, have fallen from 27.3 per 1,000 in 1961 to less than 5 per 1,000.
With the rise in life expectancy, there has been an out-of-control growth in chronic disease in the last few years; today, it eats up more than 70 percent of health care costs in Canada.
If one couples all of that with the sobering news that three health care “tsunamis” — diabetes, obesity, and dementia — are waiting, just around the corner, to swamp our health care system, you’ll begin to get some idea of the trouble we find ourselves in.
h/t KP
6600/YEar. I have no doubt thats the case.
The VAST majority of Canadians are likely just like me, 1 visit a yr to a Dr….the very odd time of 2-4 hrs in Urgent Care/Emerg for minor (relatively speaking), issues. Nowhere near 6600 / worth.
So let’s see some information on demographics….break it down into age groups and who and where said persons come from. I cannot believe that the last 20-30 yrs of African/Middle Eastern migration to this country has not had a deleterious effect.
Yes! +++
It is preferred that you die inside the system than be cured outside if it.
Soylent Green and Logan’s Running is a taste of the future…
Luke 21:26. Men’s heart failing them for fear…
Not mine.
Lies all lies…It is the crucial defining lie of all Canadian Defining Lies… We have Free Healthcare.. We are Canadians… Dumb Fucks….At a cost of over 25,000 per Family of 4 it is more costly than some US plans… The reason it is so expensive is because just like Free Education For the whole Ffing world.. Canadian Taxpayers also get to supply free healthcare to the whole Ffing World…
Government control of health care, medical care in reality, is why the bullshit insanity was forced upon people because of the whu who flu. Prove me wrong.
Exactly this. We can’t overwhelm the healthcare system, so lock everyone down. With zero profit motive, there was very little stretch in the system. I tell all my American friends “Never vote in single payer”.
“The problem with our health system is that when you walk through the door of a hospital you are viewed as a cost, not a customer!”
Ralph Klein
In Australia the Public sector views you as a cost, and in the Private sector they view you as a billing opportunity.
Ralph’s a moron. That trite sentiment of his is literally applicable to every service-based enterprise in any sector, public or private.
No, Ralph’s a realist. The current funding method for hospitals actually penalizes them for providing excellent care, and especially to those with complex problems. PB has it right to a degree; the private sector generally knows that it has to provide decent service at a reasonable price or the customers won’t return.
If it does not serve The Sacred Narrative, it does not exist. Plain and simple.
Tsunamis of votes are moved every election cycle by the CBC declaring that “candidate X has declared war on health care”. One must conclude, things are exactly the way the citizens of Post Rational Canada want them to be.
Democracy is a system, that guarantees you have exactly the health care, that you deserve. Every time you blow a tire going over that pothole that has existed in the same place since you started driving, be happy that you put the same people in charge of your health, as you tasked with maintaining your roads.
How many years you been blaming the voters of Toronto, or Quebec, for your problems? And how has all the energy and time you spent doing that, improved your life.
My understanding is that budgets are set for hospitals at the beginning of the year. So if you have a bad flu season for example, then much of that budget gets drawn down at the beginning of the year, so the administrator has to protect his remaining budget, which may mean closing down some beds.
But by the end of the year if they’ve ended Up with too much budget left, they need to spend it. Time for some junkets!
Since government is paying anyway, it would be better for hospitals to bill government for the services they administer at the time they administer.
Not to say I am advocating for our current system, but if we’re stuck with it it’s a better way to administer funds
Isn’t COVID being used to fix this?
Nope, being used to destroy, as it isn’t going to kill us all, in fact less than the seasonal flu kills. The government actions have been very dangerous and the not-vaccines are the icing on the dangerous cake.
Our health care systems stink. In Ontario you’re lucky if you have a doctor and if you have one you can’t see them when you need to so it’s off to the hospital emergencies which can mean long wait times.
Of course during the pandemic pandemonium it was telephone appointments, no in person doctor visits for sure.
These appointments were close to useless beyond discussing medications or what some of these potions were doing to you!
Vive le Canada!
Liz. Where I live has been the exception to the rule when it comes to serious medical problems. Electives are like every where else, one year to two years for some surgeries.
My wife received a cancer diagnosis a short while ago. From diagnosis to successful surgery was two months. But don’t need hips or knees worked on that can be up to a year an a half, and that was before the whu who flu.
Health care systems are expensive. When I moved back from the US in 2014, I was paying more than $6604.00 US per year in Obamacare premiums with a $5000.00 annual deductible. All systems are based on a pool to spread the risk. Many individuals incurring low to no costs for years are paired with cancer, heart and other patients who incur very high costs. All systems must be based on rationing of resources because although no can be kept alive forever, there are expectations that the systems try to do so. The US systems are expensive but the service and expectations of service are higher than in Canada. Canada’s situation is that its mediocre single-payer system is more or less adequate for life threatening care, but pathetically tied to waiting times for most all other service delivery. It’s shame is that the delivery of state-run irreformable unionized bureaucracies is a monopoly and people choosing to spend their own money on their own health care in a more timely manner must leave the country to do so. It is a system devised and maintained for serfs.
I think that Ontario spends about 46% of it’s budget on medical care and there are countless fund raisers for everything from bedpans to buildings. My taxes, which have been very high in the past, paid for and still pay for my medical care, not the government.
I wonder how much money “leaks” out of the health care system? How efficient in the system? What are the true market costs for health care service?
Check out the salaries of hospital administrators. I think they are hundreds of thousands above the sunshine list. Useless bureaucrats. Just one more civil servant at the trough.
For decades we have been entertained by the people who provide the system ,having private plans that provide for them,services we who pay will never see.
Some Animals are more important than others.
This Dread Covid Theatre has revealed a couple of stark facts.
Government Run Healthcare is incapable of responding to a minor panic.
To save the healthcare system,remember “Just Two Weeks”?, we forbid the citizens all their civil rights,freedoms and access to hospitals..And hired more Hall Monitors.
The second being that none of these persons so busily engaged in “Serving us” give a damn about individual rights,individual freedoms ,nor the oaths they swore to get their faces into the trough.
The arrogance,incompetence and distain for the tax payer has been the theme of Dread Covid.
Publicly funded,publicly administered Healthcare,has driven out the Medical Staff who cared.
Only an abject moron can pretend the bureaus can provide compassionate caring service..
Or one totally ignorant of the Iron Laws of Bureaucracy..
When we made it a criminal act for a doctor to act in the best interests of their patient and imposed bureaucrats as the central scrutinizers of all processes,we killed care and imposed the Zombie.
As a side,thanks to these same bureaucratic geniuses making being an employer into a criminal liability (Bill C45),will private employment now go the way of Private Health care?
Incentives matter.
If a human can see a way to making a living (or better) providing health advice and medical procedures ,more power to them.
For we have 60 years of proof that our Bureaus can do neither.
They can however do what they truly excel at..Waste and Destroy..
Of course this takes no particular skill set,just protection from accountability and perverse incentives..
I trust my Vet and my Dentist,far more than I do my Poor Doctor,who is trapped in a never ending morass of self reporting and systemic abuse..
The Canadian Public Health Care system is nothing more than a hog trough for bureaucrats and unions.
Whenever you see the slogan “Save Public Health Care” it means Protect Union Turf.
You have a system that is too big to fail.
It will keep humming along until the printed money runs out.
Then whatever medical personnel hasn’t fled to the US will remain and ration out aspirins.
No covid is waiting to swamp our health care system, or so I’ve been told. Does that mean government supplied meals and enforced exercise, both physical and mental?
One cost driver that has not been mentioned is new medications, biological agents and treatments for genetic diseases that literally cost a million dollars a year per patient. And the pressure to fund them is huge. They usually don’t cure people, just keep them from getting worse, though there are exceptions. This ball has just started rolling, but it’s going to explode in the next few years.
For example, the at best marginally beneficial treatment for Alzheimer’s that has just been approved by the FDA will cost 70K+ per year per patient. Multiple that by the number of potential patients, and we are talking billions!
The baby boomer’s old age will collapse the single payer systems in the US (Medicare recipients increasing at 10,000 per day currently) and Canada. I suspect that there will be a major campaign to vilify boomers over the next decade or so and bring down laws aimed at limiting expenditures on them and or offering incentives for euthanizing them. Canadian boomers will likely have to travel to other countries to extend their lives with their savings if they haven’t already been expropriated by the Spawn’s future wealth taxes or inflation.
One sad aspect of all this is that we can’t have a rational conversation about Health Care reform. Maybe look at some hybrid systems in Europe. Nope. Verboten.