The Truth About Canada Read Free Page A

effect on medicare.
    Let’s look at some more numbers to compare costs. In December 2006, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) said that per-capita healthcare spending in 2006 in current Canadian dollars was expected to be $4,548, for a total of $148-billion, or 10.3 percent of GDP, with a continuation of the approximate 70-percent-public and 30-percent-private ratio, or $104-billion to $44-billion in 2006.
    In contrast to the “runaway” increases often proclaimed by some of the media and conservative healthcare critics, total health expenditures in Canada as a percentage of GDP were 10 percent in 1992, and 14 years later, in 2006, only 10.3 percent. In the United States, it’s now almost 16 percent and increasing, while per-capita healthcare spending is now headed for $7,000 (U.S.). For many years, the United States has spent far more on health as a percentage of GDP than any other country. At this writing, their spending is forecast to reach 20 percent by 2016, while Canada, in a list of the top 30 health spenders, is in eighth place. Some of the countries that traditionally spend more than Canada are Switzerland (11.3 percent), Germany (11.1 percent), Luxembourg, France, Greece, Iceland, and Norway.
    Noted American economists Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, writing in the March 23, 2006, edition of The New York Review of Books , put the American situation this way:
We spend far more on health care than other advanced countries — almost twice as much per capita as France, almost two and a half times as much as Britain. Yet we do considerably worse even than the British on basic measures of health performance, such as life expectancy and infant mortality.
    The United Nations reports that “on a per capita basis the United States spends twice the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development average on health care … yet some countries that spend substantially less than the United States have healthier populations.” For example,
Malaysia — a country with an average income one quarter that of the United States — has achieved the same infant mortality rate as the United States.
Over 40 percent of the uninsured (in the U.S.) do not have a regular place to receive medical treatment when they are sick, and more than a third say that they or someone in their family went without needed medical care, including recommended treatment or prescription drugs in the last year because of cost.
The uninsured, once in hospital, receive fewer services and are more likely to die than are insured patients. Being born into an uninsured household increases the probability of death before age 1 by about 50 percent. 11
    In terms of public as opposed to private expenditure as a percentage of all spending on health, all the following OECD countries have a higher proportion of public expenditure than does Canada: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Portugal, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
    As indicated above, about 30 percent of all health spending in Canada is private. In 2006, public-sector financing of health expenditures came to 70.3 percent of total spending, while private funding made up 29.7 percent. The highest percentage of private spending is, of course, in the United States, at a huge 56 percent.
    Total per-capita health spending in the United States is almost two and a half times the OECD average. In Canada, it is one and a quarter times the OECD average. 12 Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerlandand the Unites States have higher per-capita total spending than Canada.
    If you look at total public-health spending in the OECD and include long-term care expenditures, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, France, and Germany had higher expenditures in 2005 as a percentage of GDP than did Canada, and 24 countries spent less. The Canadian Institute for Health Information estimates that our total health