This year, Canadian patients faced a median wait of 27.7 weeks for medically necessary treatment from a specialist after being referred by a general practitioner. That’s over six months—the longest ever recorded. It’s a slight increase from last year’s median wait—and a 198% increase from the 9.3-week median wait that patients faced in 1993, the year that Fraser began tracking wait times. …

Across the board, patients waited a median of just under five weeks more than what doctors say is “clinically reasonable” to receive treatment from a specialist after securing a referral. Such long delays for treatment can put patients’ health at risk, as can similarly long waits for diagnostics. In 2023, Canadians faced a median wait of around 13 weeks for an MRI, 6.6 weeks for a CT scan, and just over 5 weeks for an ultrasound.

All told, more than 1.2 million Canadians, out of a population of 38 million, were waiting for some form of treatment in 2023. If each of those patients is waiting for just one procedure, that means 3% of the Canadian population was waiting to receive medical care this year. In Nova Scotia, just over 8% of the provincial population was stuck in line.

[This is what happens in single-payer systems: care gets rationed. In the 1980s, HMOs got terrible press in the US for exactly this reason, and eventually that model has receded — in the private sector. It’s still in use at the VA and in the Indian Health Service, with largely the same results as Canada has in its socialist-medicine system. The Canadian model doesn’t incentivize more providers and more opportunities for care, which then seriously limits capacity, especially when it comes to specialties. These long lines are the reason that the Canadian system now promotes assisted suicide rather than medical care for the seriously ill. — Ed]