Opinion: Canadian healthcare choke points put patient lives at risk

From Healthing.ca:

Canada’s healthcare system is strained. It was always strained. It was designed that way.

The United States healthcare system has excess capacity. Costs are constrained by insurance companies requiring pre-approval before non-emergency interventions. Physicians and hospitals typically have several employees tasked with ongoing communication with insurance companies. This is inefficient and costly.

In Canada, costs are constrained by numerous choke points. Numbers of hospital beds, operating rooms, CT/MRI/PET scanners, training positions for physicians, nurses, and support staff, and the budgets to operate all of these are tightly controlled by government. It is much easier to control costs using the Canadian approach (limiting supply) than the American approach (limiting utilization of available supply).

 

To read the entire article, please go to: https://www.healthing.ca/patient-advocacy/opinion-canadian-healthcare-choke-points-put-patient-lives-at-risk