Monte wrote:
The long waiting lists are not so long, sometimes nonexistent, depending on what part of Canada you happen to be in.
The real problem is that private practice is rapidly edging out the public system. People are willing to pay double or more (once to the public system via taxes and again to a private provider) to avoid the wait times. In every province except Alberta, a doctor can choose to service either public or private patients, not both. If he chooses to service public patients he deals with the cap and has to take whatever the government pays him. If he services private patients he can schedule as many patients as he wants and charge whatever he wants. All this means physicians are exiting public service and going into private practice, driving up the wait times for the public system even further.
Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Ontario don't see this because while doctors can enter private practice, they cannot charge more than the public system would pay out for that same service. Quebec had this law too but the courts threw it out. So they can only really take patients that are willing to pay double for the privilege of being seen earlier, which really limits the market for them. In the other provinces, anything goes. There is no regulation like the US where he has to charge everyone the same fee for the same service, either. If you want to pay four times as much, sure, he can get you in today. If he thinks you're a rich idiot he can quote you twice as much as the next guy for the same treatment, it's perfectly legal.
In Alberta it's even worse, they recently made it legal for doctors to service both private and public patients. So now every doctor there is giving preferential treatment to those who will pay extra and maybe sticking in the people on the government plan six months from now, if they have time.