Canadian Report Finds Long Wait Times for Healthcare

Canwest News Service has a story discussing an annual report from Canadian medical associations on wait times for health care: “The 2009 report card released Thursday by the Wait Time Alliance, says there remains ‘much unfinished business,’ in improving the amount of time between when a patient is referred by a family doctor to when treatment is provided by a specialist. The WTA is made up of 13 medical associations including the Canadian Medical Association. The report also notes that patients are still having a hard time accessing information about wait times.”

What really jumps out are two statistics:
1. For cancer patients, the study found that the median wait time for radiation therapy was almost seven weeks, exceeding the benchmark of four weeks.
2. Patients are also facing long delays when they go the emergency department, the WTA said, waiting an average of nine hours to be seen and treated and for patients who needed to be admitted, the average wait time was nearly 24 hours.

A median of seven weeks for cancer treatments? That means half the patients in this study waited even longer than that. Would someone be able to survive that long with no treatment? And can you imagine waiting nine hours to be seen in the emergency room?

These are just two examples of why you would not like Obama, Reid and Pelosi's proposed nationalized health care.

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