Canada's For Profit Medical Clinics Double Bill, Create Longer Wait Times For Treatment

From the CBC, the article "Canada Finds out the Hard Way: For-profit clinics double-billing, Create Long Waiting Lines," should open a few eyes. Guess we could have seen this coming:

The federal government has failed to enforce the Canada Health Act's requirements for equal access to hospital care, instead allowing more for-profit medical clinics over the last five years. It investigated 130 for-profit surgical, MRI/CT and "boutique" clinics across Canada that sell access to doctors and health professionals for thousands of dollars per patient per year.

They found evidence to suspect 89 clinics in five provinces may have violated requirements by openly selling medically necessary services and double-billing both patients and governments for services.

"For-profit clinics are also taking specialists, health professionals and operating room nurses out of local public hospitals to serve less urgent patients, often for extra fees," said report author Natalie Mehra, director of the Ontario Health Coalition. "Despite claims about reducing wait times, we found direct evidence that poaching staff out of local hospitals by for-profit clinics worsened shortages in local hospitals, forcing the hospitals to reduce MRI hours."

"Researchers set out to find all the for-profit diagnostic, surgical and boutique-type physician clinics across the country, to see how they work and how they're affecting the cost and access to public health care in this country," she said. In Ontario and Manitoba, for-profit cancer and cataract surgery clinics gave evidence of higher costs per treatment than non-profit clinics, the report said, noting Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan and British Columbia are considering more for-profit privatization.

A new report says there is no evidence to support claims that increasing for-profit private elements of Canadian health care will improve care quality or reduce costs. The report, paid for by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, comes on the eve of a National Day of Action for Medicare. "For-profit private health care takes away from the public system. It is not a solution but a huge problem. We need to move forward with public health care, not backwards," said Linda Silas, the president of the nurses union, in a statement.

According to the report:
- Canada spends more on private health care than France, Sweden, Italy or Germany.
- Private health care costs are increasing faster than public health care costs in Canada.
- 3.5 million Canadians are not insured or underinsured for essential medicines.
- expansion of for-profit surgical clinics in New Zealand and Australia
dramatically increased wait lists for the same treatments in the public
system

Note: If for profits are poaching staff for profit health care facilities, increasing wait times, then this is the logical outcome: A health insurance policy that sends people facing long waits for surgery to private clinics or the United States is the latest flash point for critics warning Canada is on a slippery slope toward for-profit health care.