Health-care costs for the average Canadian family have grown 1.6 times faster than the cost of housing, 2.2 times faster than the cost of food, and 1.6 times faster than its average income between 1997 and 2025. And yet, the health-care system itself has deteriorated.
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Of course, Canadians pay for our health-care system through our taxes. According to the latest data, a typical Canadian family of four paid just over $19,000 (about 24% of their total tax bill) for their universal health-care system last year. That’s almost double what it was nearly three decades ago in 1997, after accounting for inflation.
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Looked at another way, health-care costs for the average Canadian family have grown 1.6 times faster than the cost of housing, 2.2 times faster than the cost of food, and 1.6 times faster than its average income between 1997 and 2025. And yet, while spending on health care has risen faster than incomes and the cost of basic necessities, the health-care system itself has deteriorated.
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Back in 1997, the median wait — from referral by a general practitioner, to an appointment with a specialist, to treatment — was 11.9 weeks. Since then, the median wait has ballooned to 28.6 weeks. In other words, Canadians now wait almost two-and-a-half times longer than back in 1997 for medical care, while the cost of health care (again, through our taxes) for the average Canadian family has nearly doubled.
Expensive system
Before you ask if the solution is to just spend more, know this — Canada’s health-care system is already one of the developed world’s most expensive. Yet our system also ranks as one of the developed world’s least accessible for the availability of physicians, diagnostic technologies and hospital beds.
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Exactly how did Canadians get stuck with a bigger bill for poorer service after three decades of promises and commitments by provincial and federal governments to fix health care and shorten wait times? In short, our governments have followed the wrong approach.
Meanwhile, countries such as Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Australia all provide better value and more timely access to universal health care by embracing the private sector with its innovation, efficiency and patient-focus. In these countries, private for-profit hospitals comprise between 39% and 64% of all hospitals in the health-care system, delivering care to patients with both private and publicly-funded insurance.
Yes, you read that correctly — patients in these countries are not restricted to a government monopoly like in Canada, but are free to seek care from both private and public providers and free to choose to pay privately if they wish.
Patients waiting
The result?
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In 2023, 65.2% of Canadians waited more than one month for an appointment with a specialist, far more than in Australia (51.9%), Germany (44.2%), the Netherlands (35.7%) and Switzerland (36.3%). The results are even more stark for the wait for treatment: 58.3% of Canadians waited more than two months for non-emergency surgery — a big number compared to Australia (33.1%), Switzerland (21.1%), Germany (20.4%) and the Netherlands (20.3%). Clearly, far from something to be feared, the private sector helps provide a superior universal health-care experience.
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Canada’s health-care system comes at a high cost, both financially for taxpayers and physically and emotionally for patients stuck in lengthy queues for treatment. While we’ve seen some recent steps in the right direction — including the Alberta government planning to allow physicians to work in both the public and private sectors — until we follow the lead of higher-performing universal health-care countries, Canada’s pricey health-care woes will continue.
Nadeem Esmail and Mackenzie Moir are analysts at the Fraser Institute.
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