Posted on 03/19/2018 1:02:09 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Health care is perhaps Canada’s defining obsession. As a nation, we crow about it and complain about it. We deify Tommy Douglas, rage about wait times, fret over private clinics and fight campaigns on minute points of privatization.
But for all the endless studies, Royal Commissions and political bloviating, it can be hard to know how much Canadians actually pay for health care, not as a nation, but as individuals.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) believes Canada spent approximately $228 billion on health care in 2016. That’s 11.1 per cent of Canada’s entire GDP and $6,299 for every Canadian resident.
That per capita rate would put Canada near the high end of what other advanced economies pay. According to the CIHI, in 2014, the last year for which comparable data was available, Canada spent $5,543 per resident, more than the United Kingdom ($4,986) and Australia ($5,187) but less than Sweden ($6,245) and far less than the United States ($11,126).
Assuming roughly similar rates of growth, Canada will remain near the top of the tightly clustered group of wealthy countries that have strong public or mixed public/private systems in terms of per capita spending this year. (The primarily private system in the United States remains an outlier.)
But per capita is just an average. Not everyone pays the same. And figuring out what any individual Canadian, or even a representative sample of Canadian demographics, pays turns out to be a lot harder than it seems.
This week, the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver think-tank dedicated to small government thinking, took a thwack at the problem. Researchers at the institute used a proprietary system —the same one used to calculate the institute’s controversial Tax Freedom Day — to break Canadians into a host of economic tranches.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalpost.com ...
I had a knee replacement last November after waiting for a year and a half. A friend’s sister went to see her doctor and found out she needed a knee replacement and he asked her how soon she would like to be booked in. Oh, I should mention that this lady is a judge here in Ontario.
So, socialized medicine is great is you are one of the elites.
Bingo!
So the average Canadian pays $22,000 per year for bad quality healthcare.
“Has anything changed in Canada (for better or worse ) since?”
No,it was just an FYI post because when I started reading it I knew I had read it before.
.
Much much lower.
Well, there are the Jamaicans in Toronto, and the Chinese and Indians (dot, not feather) in Vancouver getting a bit frisky lately.
It was the Premier of Newfoundland, and he was on vacation in Florida, when he had the procedure (developed in Canada, btw) performed.
The only folks who made a big deal about it were the same ones who scream about gun control down there. And of course the occasional Canada-basher.
Paying for ‘’free health care’’?
And availability - many up in Canada wait many months for a procedure we can get next week.
They forgot to average that into the figures.
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