Despite what Michael Moore would have everyone believe, health care in Canada is indeed plagued by waiting lists. And where people need to queue up for health care, some people—people with connections—will jump the queue.
According to the Fraser Institute’s most recent waiting list survey, it took an average of 18 weeks in 2010 for Canadian patients to receive elective treatment from a specialist once referred by a general practitioner. Those referred for orthopedic surgery waited an average of 35 weeks. The wait just to get an MRI is nearly 10 weeks.
In light of the ongoing need to queue up for health care in Canada, it’s hardly surprising to hear stories about queue-jumping. The latest such story comes from the Canadian province of Alberta, where Stephen Duckett, the former head of Alberta Health Services, recently alleged the existence of a back-channel system for members of the provincial legislature to help their friends get access to faster care.
Alberta’s health minister, Gene Zwozdesky, dismissed the allegations as unfounded, but politicians from opposition parties are calling for a full public inquiry.
Scarce resources in a free market are allocated according to laws of supply and demand, and importantly, their quantities are not fixed. When demand exceeds supply, prices go up, encouraging producers of goods and providers of services to increase their supplies. If the health care market in Canada were free, waiting lists would lead to the training and hiring of more doctors and nurses, to the provision of more hospital beds, to the purchase of more MRI machines, and so on.
Scarce resources in the absence of a free market still need to be allocated. In the idealized world that exists only in the minds of utopian planners, this allocation is carried out according to need and urgency, divorced from crass commercial considerations. In the real world, however, political pull is certain to play a role. There is simply no getting around it.
Why is this so? Well, consider: Wouldn’t you help a friend jump the queue? If you were in a position to do so, wouldn’t you help relieve a loved one’s suffering and anxiety as quickly as you could, reducing the risk of complications and even death? How could you not?
In a free market, you would help a friend get speedier care by paying for it. In the absence of a free market, you would do so by using whatever political pull was available to you.
People are self-interested, plain and simple, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. As long as the initiation of force is barred from human relations, our self-interest is guided, to invoke the ever-relevant Adam Smith, as if by an invisible hand, to the benefit of all thanks to the mechanism of voluntary exchange. But when political forces try to restrict this perfectly normal desire to help oneself and one’s loved ones first, some people inevitably get screwed.
As Danielle Smith, leader of Alberta’s opposition Wildrose Alliance party, puts it, “The way you actually solve the problem of queue-jumping is you eliminate the queues.” The only way to do that, as un-Canadian as it sounds to some, is to push for freer markets in health care.
