Private healthcare business booming in Canada

I found this article very intresting.

Tom Blackwell
National Post

Saturday, April 23, 2005

Patients fed up with long waiting lists in Canada are fuelling a fast-growing demand for brokerages that arrange speedy service in the United States as well as in Quebec's burgeoning for-profit medical industry.

Brokers and other similar companies say business has as much as tripled over the past year as Canadians apparently become more comfortable with paying for diagnostic tests, second opinions and even surgery.

They say their patients include not only the wealthy but also middle-class people willing to take out second mortgages or lines of credit to pay for faster care.

Driving the move are Canada's lengthy waiting lists for many medical procedures. A study last year found Canadians waited an average of 8.4 weeks from their general practitioner's referral to an appointment with a specialist in 12 different medical specialties, then waited another 9.5 weeks for their treatment. Those wait times are almost double what a similar study found in 1993.

An increasing number of patients looking to skirt the public system are being referred to physicians in Quebec's private health care sector, where operations such as hip replacements can be bought out of pocket -- and where the federal government has done little to intervene.

Patients approach the agencies in need of everything from joint replacements to diagnostic work and cancer treatment.

The number that OneWorld Medicare of B.C. sends to the United States for at least a consultation has jumped three-fold over the past 12 months, while the company fielded twice as many inquiries between January and March as it did in all of 2004.

"We have seen a very large growth in the last year," said Mike Starko of OneWorld.

"We shouldn't have to be sending people down to the U.S., we really shouldn't. But that's the unfortunate reality at this point."

Some of the companies act simply as brokers, locating an appropriate private hospital or clinic to perform the needed procedure and negotiating what they call a discounted price. They take a portion of the savings as their fees.

Another company, Medextra, provides a broader service, helping people navigate the system by getting them expert second opinions, a private-sector procedure or the right care within the public system in Canada. Its basic rate is $180 an hour.

Business has doubled over the past year, with about 100 patients being served at any given time, said Dr. Jeff Brock, co-owner of the firm, which is also based in British Columbia.

"There's been a really big shift in public sentiment," said Evan Savelson, another co-owner of Medextra. "There's been a shift from people having very negative feelings about alternatives to solving their medical problems to people welcoming it and being willing to pay for it."

Rick Baker, who started Timely Medical Alternatives in B.C. about 18 months ago without a client in his first month, says business is now thriving, with half a dozen e-mails and as many phone calls from patients waiting for him every morning.

One of them was Velma Sutter, 68, of Edmonton. Two Alberta specialists had told her the excruciating pain she was feeling was a result of back trouble, but she'd have to wait a year to get into a pain clinic. Mrs. Sutter headed to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota in January, where doctors said she had been wrongly diagnosed and really needed a hip replacement.
She retained Timely Medical, which got her into surgery in Bellingham, Wash., within two weeks. She said she feels worlds better now. "It's the way to go," she said of the brokerage service.

While the companies still send many of their patients to the United States, they are also looking increasingly to the Quebec private sector, where, Mr. Savelson says, there is a "tremendous" range of service, from high-tech imaging to eye surgery. The province even boasts a private orthopedic-surgery hospital.

Although federal legislation requires all medically necessary services to be provided in the universal, public system, private physicians in Quebec say they can operate legally because they have opted out of medicare.

"As you know, Quebec is a different country than the rest of us, and as such they operate under the radar of the federal Health Minister," Mr. Baker said.

A study by Montreal's Gazette last month found 90 doctors -- most of them practising in Montreal -- have opted out of medicare, far more than in all the other provinces combined. It also found Montreal has a dozen private medical-imaging clinics, many more than any other city in the country.

In September, Prime Minister Paul Martin struck a deal with the provinces that would see Ottawa invest $41.2-billion in additional health care funding over 10 years, much of it intended to reduce wait times. The deal is supposed to include medically suitable "benchmarks" for wait times for certain procedures, but it is up to the provinces to decide how they will reach those targets.

Until changes are made, Mr. Baker's clients -- such as an eight-year-old girl who went temporarily deaf from an ear infection in January, 2004 -- may continue to look elsewhere for help. The relatively straightforward surgery she needed to clear it up was not available until last July, then was postponed until September, then March.

Mr. Baker's company stepped in last fall and arranged an appointment with an ear, nose and throat specialist in Washington. The doctor took one look and told the girl's father that if he waited for surgery any longer "your daughter will be dead." The infection had spread alarmingly during the long wait.

A client at OneWorld needed a double knee replacement but was told he could only get one knee done at a time in B.C., with a year-long queue just for the first one. The broker found a hospital in the United States to operate on both knees almost immediately, and within a couple of months he was walking without even much of a limp, Mr. Starko said.

http://www.canada.com/national/national ... 57&rfp=dta

You post a link from The AARP? That would be like me posting from Marxist web site in defense of communism.

And why are you highjacking my thread? Do you find the need to deflect my point. Why dont you deal with what my article states.

So you find the article interesting NYC, what's your point.

My point is your "Free Healthcare" is Garbage.

There's not a whole lot of difference between gross health indicators (life expectancy, infant mortality, etc) between Canada and the US. Both countries have some of the best healthcare on the planet, and we live comparatively healthy lives to a comparatively old age. So, the ratcheting up of all this rhetoric, and creating crises is a bit pointless.

Also pointless are extreme entrenched positions such as "absolute" public care, or "absolute" private care. The optimal point will be somewhere in the middle not at the extreme. Just becasue we allow some private care doe snot mean that we're "opening the floodgates" or letting in the "thin end of the wedge." We already have private healthcare, to a certain extent, and the US has public healthcare to no small extent.

The basis, as far as I'm concerned, of the Canadian healthcare system is that you get decent medical care when you need, whether you're rich or poor. I'm all in favour of that. If we need to change the level of privatization to allow that, I have no problem with it.