Healthcare in Canada is far from free.
Sure, you may be able to see a doctor with your OHIP card rather than paying with your credit card, but the reality is that Canadians pay some of the highest healthcare costs in the developed world through taxes.
And the sad truth is, Canadians aren’t getting what we’re paying for.
Plenty of nations around the world offer universal healthcare systems with shorter wait times, better doctor-to-patient ratios, and more hospital beds.
The Fraser Institute studies many aspects of Canada’s healthcare system, and points out many of its failings, in a number of different annual reports.
One interesting one that was released recently looks at the costs borne by patients simply by waiting to access Canada’s healthcare system.
The study looks at the average hours that patients lost during the work week in 2025 waiting for care. And the numbers the study’s authors came up with are staggering.
According to the report, Canadian patients lost over $4.2 billion in wages waiting for healthcare last year. That works out to roughly $3,000 for the estimated 1.39 million Canadians who were waiting for treatment in 2025.
And if one factors in hours lost on evenings and weekends, the estimated cost reaches $12.9 billion, or roughly $9,300 per person.
Plus, this estimate only accounts for hours lost by the individual waiting for treatment. It doesn’t look at hours lost by family members or friends who were waiting with that patient.
Patients could have been waiting for medical care ranging from orthopaedic surgery to cancer surgery to general surgery.
The time lost factors in a decline or lack of productivity due to “the physical and emotional impact of an untreated medical condition.”
Roughly 13.2 per cent of Canadians waiting for treatment reported that they were adversely affected by waiting for non-emergency surgery, which is the statistic the Fraser Institute used to calculate hours lost. In other words, the study does not assume that every person waiting for treatment automatically has lost productivity.
In the Fraser Institute’s study, some provinces fared better than others. Ontario, for example, saw the fewest costs per patients waiting for care, at $1,918. New Brunswick, on the other hand, saw the highest, at $4,864.
Ontario’s nation-leading score should be expected, given the province’s size, but that amount of economic loss shouldn’t be acceptable, regardless.
The time has clearly come to look at healthcare reform.
Some solutions offered in a recent study by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute include funding patients rather than hospitals (a reform recently adopted in Alberta), increasing the number of students admitted to Canada’s medical schools, taking more advantage of virtual care, cutting the amount of bureaucracy and red tape faced by family doctors, and contracting out procedures to privately run clinics, among others.
All of these solutions could shorten wait times and ensure that less money is lost each and every year with Canadians unable to work while waiting for care.
Finally, it’s time to stop stigmatizing the idea of private delivery of some healthcare services. Instead of pointing to failures like the United States, it’s time to point to successes like the Netherlands.
Besides, a significant chunk of our current system already is private (drugs, eye care, and dental care), so looking at optimizing the system by allowing some private provision of healthcare services shouldn’t be the monstrous idea it’s often made out to be.
Canadians are sick and tired of waiting for care. The time for reform is now, and it’s time for our politicians to stop pretending that pouring more and more money into the status quo is somehow working.
It’s time to reform the system and it’s high time to put real reform, not just marginal tinkering, on the table.
Jay Goldberg is the Canadian Affairs Manager at the Consumer Choice Center. He previously served as the Ontario Director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a policy fellow at the Munk School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. Jay holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto.
