Wall Street Journal Examines Rationing of Care in Canadian Health Care System

In the sixth part of a series on rationing health care, the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday examined Canada's universal health care system, which offers free, equal-access care to all its citizens and "explicitly ration[s]" medical resources. According to the Journal, health outcomes in Canada are "generally as good" as those in the United States, and health care spending accounts for 10% of gross domestic product, compared with 14% in the United States. However, the "trade-offs are steep," the Journal reports, adding that Canadian hospitals are slower to adopt the latest technology and there are fewer specialists for patients to see. According to the Journal, the "riskiest trade-off" is "troublingly long waits" for patients to receive care, which occurs in many national health care plans. The Journal reports that it can take "weeks or even months" to get an appointment with a specialist after a referral and some hospital patients wait for "hours and even days on gurneys in the corridor, and receiv[e] treatment there." The waiting stems in part because Canadian hospitals try to run at full capacity in order to curb costs, meaning "lines always form," the Journal reports. Ted Marmor, a health policy observer at Yale University, said that waiting lists are a "sign that the health care system isn't wasting money on unnecessary procedures, equipment or personnel," the Journal reports. "If you don't wait in a medical system, there's a problem," Marmor said, but added that the question is "whether people are waiting inappropriately" (Cherney, Wall Street Journal, 11/12).