For more than two decades, the Fraser Institute has annually surveyed specialist physicians across Canada to estimate how long patients wait for treatment. Our latest survey found that in 2016, overall, patients were waiting 20 weeks between referral from a family doctor to treatment — the longest wait in our survey’s history and 115 per cent longer than in 1993.
While the intervening years have seen increased measurement and acknowledgment of wait times in Canada, they also produced an unhealthy acceptance of the problem — as though wait times are the necessary price for universal health care. Like the anecdote of the frog in the pot of cold water, which is slowly brought to a boil without the frog’s knowledge or immediate discomfort, the slow but fairly consistent annual lengthening of wait times for treatment has made us sometimes forget that our system fails to deliver timely access to care and real people suffer as a result.
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