Self-styled health policy expert and defender of the Canadian health care rationing system Matthew Holt is now making excuses for the long waits for MRI appointments in Canada by lauding a report purportedly showing that the use of MRI machines is "more efficient" in Canada than in the U.S. as measured by MRI scans per scanner.
With the severe shortage of diagnostic machines there, its no surprise that they are more heavily used. However, by Mr. Holt's logic, Canada could further increase "efficiency" by actually reducing the number of available MRI scanners. In fact, a single MRI scanner for the entire country would be the most "efficient".
Canadians endure long waits for diagnostic tests that Americans would not tolerate. My blog entry from last week about a teenager waiting for knee surgery is typical. His parents ended up paying $550 for an MRI "after waiting six months to no avail in the public system". Rick Baker of Timely Medical Alternatives, a Vancouver-based organization which takes waiting Canadians across the border for health care, told me a couple of weeks ago that he is encountering desperate people from Manitoba willing to fly more than a thousand miles to get an ultrasound! However, the real cruelty of the Canadian health care rationing system becomes apparent when considering people who suspect that they may have cancer. As I noted in my recent commentary:
In Canada, the longer a person waits for a diagnostic test that enables a doctor to definitively diagnose cancer - the longer that person is kept off the politically-sensitive waiting list for cancer treatment - and the better their decrepit and inhumane system looks.
While he's on the topic of the efficiencies of the Canadian system, perhaps Mr. Holt could explore the efficiency of the Burnaby Hospital in British Columbia where the aforementioned teenager is still waiting to have his knee surgery:
... there are over 19 thousand people waiting for orthopedic surgery in British Columbia alone - yet surgeons are limited to one day a week in the OR, the OR is shut down to "elective" surgery at 3:30 in the afternoon and one OR at the hospital mentioned is used for storage!
14 Feb 2006 @ 9:59am