Could anyone put up a time line on Canadian health care over the years?
How did it get to this point?
I don't think that would be worthwhile because things vary so much geographically. I haven't lived in Canada for a while but when I did I moved around a LOT and some areas had MUCH better medical care than others (including waiting times).
I suspect the amount of variation geographically may have stayed the same or even increased in recent years though. For example, in the past 2 years friends and relatives in Canada (Southern and Central Ontario; Manitoba (near Winnipeg) have needed:
1) one MRI had to wait a week but meeting the doctor and initial Xrays were the same day
2 another MRI had to wait 2 weeks but was for a knee problem so clearly not life-threatening
3) a complete knee replacement (just a 2 month wait after diagnosis -- I expected the wait to be much longer in Central Ontario but evidently a lot of medical practitioners wanted to get out of Toronto, but be within a morning's drive, so even small centres seemed to have no problem attracting doctors -- in contrast to, say, Temagami perhaps)
4) kidney stone shockwave lithotripsy (4 weeks but could have been done within 2 weeks if he had been willing to go to a different hospital which was a 2 hour drive away).
5) I also know of one elderly lady whose doctor retired, and she had to make use of the Emergency Room for 6 months until she got a regular doctor again (as noted above). During this time, she had to wait 6 hours to see a doctor just to get her blood pressure checked and prescription refilled.
6) dermatologist: 5 months wait for a fairly severe cosmetic problem on the face, but Winnipeg lacked dermatologists for some reason). This was a teenager, and this delay was the worst of these six in my opinion. Not life-threatening, but teenagers can be so cruel -- and I suspect they were.
John
