How Good is Canadian Health Care? 2005 Report

An International Comparison of Health Care Systems

Nadeem Esmail and Michael Walker

The Fraser Institute,  British Columbia, Canada - July 2005

Available online as PDF file [66p.] at: http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/admin/books/files/HowGoodIsCanHealthCare2005.pdf  

“…….Provides answers to a series of questions that are important to resolve if Canada is to make the correct choices as it amends its health care policies.

The study is strictly comparative and examines a wide number of factors for the member countries of the OECD in arriving at the answers to the questions posed. In this study, we primarily compare Canada to other countries that also have universal access, publicly funded, health care systems. Since the United States and Mexico do not, we often ignore these countries in the comparisons made. The study’s focus, therefore, is not whether we should “abandon the key elements of Canada’s compassionate approach to health care delivery,” but how we organize to achieve it.

To answer this crucial question, which is also the focus of the current debate about health care reform in Canada, we examine whether other industrialized, universal-access countries have implemented those policies that are at the centre of the health care debate in Canada: policies that have been shown to produce, at lower cost, superior access to, and outcomes from, health care than Canada’s policies do. How much does Canada spend on health care compared to other countries?

It is often said that Canada spends too little on health care. But is it true? In order to answer the question, we first recognize that the average age of a country’s population is a big determinant of the amount of money it will have to spend in order to provide adequate health care. In Canada, those aged 65 and over consumed over 44% of provincial health care expenditures in 2002 while making up only 2.7% of the population. In order to compare countries, we adjust the data for the age of the population and discover that Canada spends more on health care than any other industrialized OECD country except Iceland and Switzerland….”

Contents

Executive summary

Introduction:

How much does Canada spend on health care compared to other countries?

Which countries other than Canada do not have cost sharing? A look at co-insurances and co-payments  

Which countries rely exclusively on government-managed hospitals to deliver publicly funded health care?

Should Canada put its doctors on salary?

Does Canada have too many doctors?

Do other countries follow Canada’s model of monopolistic public provision of health insurance?

Is the Canadian model of funding health care primarily from general tax revenues widely followed?

What are the consequences of this system?

How does Canada’s access to high-tech medicine compare to that of other countries?

Are Canadians getting their money’s worth from Canada’s expensive health care program?

Conclusion

Appendix A: Sources for policy comparison tables

Appendix B: Unadjusted ratios of physicians and technology to population

References

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