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O Canada!
By Mike Edwards, November & December 2004
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The pain in her back was terrible, recalls Diane Tupper, who lives in a
Vancouver suburb. When she finally got a consultation with a
neurosurgeon—after waiting eight months—he said he could fix her
spine. Then he delivered the bad news: "Our surgery waiting time is a year
and a half to two years."
If Tupper, a 63-year-old lawyer, could hold out, her surgery would be free
under Canada's universal-care system. But if she hopped over the border to
St. Joseph Hospital in Bellingham, Washington, she could be in the operating
room in days. The cost would be about $47,000. "I'm not a well-off
person," Tupper says, "but I felt I didn't have any choice."
Tupper took out two lines of credit, borrowed $14,500 from a friend, and went
to Bellingham.
To many Americans, Canada may look like health care's promised land.
Care for all 32.5 million citizens is paid for from taxes. Drugs are typically
30 to 50 percent cheaper than in the U.S.—which is why more than a
million statesiders now get prescriptions filled in Canada.
But recently, Canada's system has fallen behind, hobbled by budget cuts,
regulations, and shortages of physicians, nurses, and sophisticated equipment
such as MRI machines. A recent survey put the backlog of unperformed procedures
at 876,584. The waiting time for a hip replacement in Tupper's province,
British Columbia, is nearly a year, even longer for a knee replacement.
Filling that gap are U.S. border cities such as Buffalo, New York, and Great
Falls, Montana. Minot, North Dakota, attracts people needing CT scans and MRIs,
for which they'd wait months in Saskatchewan. Randy Schwan of Trinity
Health in Minot says Canadians are amazed to find that "a doctor says
we've got to get a test, and the same day someone wheels them down the hall
for that test." At the globally famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
Minnesota, Canadians are the largest foreign-patient constituency.
Some provinces cover care outside of Canada under special circumstances. To
trim the waiting list of cancer patients needing radiation treatment, Ontario
picked up the bill for 1,650 people who went to the U.S. in 2000 and 2001.
So, get to a Canadian hospital's emergency room after a heart attack and
you'll be treated promptly—with no worry about cost. But the system,
once the nation's pride, has become, as one official says,
"functionally obsolete."
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