Chart of the Day

The Fraiser Institute charts the effectiveness of Canada's single payer system, using the metric of waiting times between when a physician refers a patient to a specialist and when treatment is received, showing the changes between 1993 and 2009:


source: Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada, 2009 Report at 57

As the report explains (at 7, 10 & 37):

Despite a two week fall from the high reached in 2007, the total wait time remains high, both historically and internationally. Compared to 1993, the total waiting time in 2009 is 73 per cent longer. Moreover, academic studies of waiting time have found that Canadians wait longer than Americans, Germans, and Swedes (some times) for cardiac care, although not as long as New Zealanders or the British. . .

One interpretation of hospital waiting lists is that they reflect excess demand for medical treatments per formed in hospitals and that they therefore represent the substitution of "non-price" rationing of scarce resources for rationing by price. In this case, the rationing takes place through enforced waiting for a given treatment or procedure. . .

Further confirmation of the magnitude of Canadian waiting times can be derived from 5 international comparative studies . . . Coyte et al. (1994) found that in the late 1980s, Canadians waited longer than Americans for orthopedic consultation (5.4 versus 3.2 weeks) and for surgery post-consultation (13.5 versus 4.5 weeks). Collins-Nakai et al.(1992) discovered that in 1990, Canadians waited longer than Germans and Americans, respectively, for cardiac catheterization (2.2 months, versus 1.7 months, versus 0 months), angioplasty (11 weeks, versus 7 weeks, versus 0 weeks), and bypass surgery (5.5 months, versus 4.4 months, versus 0 months). Another study of cardiac procedures, by Carroll et al. (1995), revealed that in 1992 Canadians generally waited longer for both elective and urgent coronary artery bypass than did Americans (whether in private or public Veterans' Administration hospitals) and Swedes, and longer than Americans (in either hospital type) for either elective or urgent angiography.

I've said it before. So what explains fact-challenged activists' and leftist legislators' love for single-payer healthcare?