Canadian Medicine

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In 2014, more than 50,000 Canadians left the country for medical treatment, a 25 percent increase from the previous year. A similar number left the country for treatment in 2015. 63,000 left in 2017.

The Fraser Institute released a study last year showing that wait times in Canada were on the increase and had hit an all-time high in more than two decades of the think tank conducting the survey. Patients reported waiting up to 20 weeks for “medically necessary” procedures such as organ transplants and heart surgery. Experts have blamed this increase in wait times on a number of factors, including different branches and departments of provincial government not communicating effectively, a lack of doctors in some areas, and people living longer and therefore requiring more care.

“Everyone has access to free medical care that is ‘good enough.’ If you want to pay for better health care, you can’t. That’s why those who can afford to, tend to go down to the U.S. for care if they have anything serious happen to them. You can have the greatest doctors in the world, but if the bureaucrats that run the system are making them treat patients with one hand tied behind their back, are they going to be delivering the best possible care?”(one of the Frazier researchers)

Whatever the underlying causes of these excessively long wait times or the motivation of patients to seek quicker medical treatment, they are leading some to worry that medical tourism is creating a two-tier system: one in which the wealthy can afford to get quicker treatment and the poor have to wait or go without.

 

Jeremy Snyder, a professor at Simon Fraser University's faculty of health sciences, said the Fraser Institute is sending a strong message that Canada has a big medical tourism problem due to massive wait times at home, which is not true.  "While we do know that a lot of Canadians are going abroad for care, the numbers the Fraser Institute is producing in this report aren't really accurate," Snyder told CTV News. "I don't think there's a really strong backing for them."
Snyder said there is no question that wait times are an issue in the Canadian health-care system and that some Canadians seek medical care elsewhere. But they do so for a number of different reasons, he said.

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And there is another element, to quote  the advice to Dustin Hoffman: Plastics. The number of plastic surgery procedures (not covered by most state insurances) is not revealed here.
And Frazier has some Koch funding--everybody has a motive.