More Canadians leaving country for health care: Report
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The flight of the sick continues to rise in Canada.
A policy brief — titled Flight of the Sick, by the Calgary-based think tank secondstreet.org — says 217,500 Canadians left the country for health care in 2017, according to Statistics Canada. If those travelling with the patients are included in the count, the total rises to 369,700 people.
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“We’ve heard stories in the news for a long time now about Canadians who don’t want to wait for health care … leave the country,” said said Colin Craig, president of secondstreet.org.
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“We’re trying to look at this through an economic lens because there’s a huge amount of economic activity that’s leaving.”
To that end, secondstreet.org noted Statistics Canada estimates that Canadians spent $690 million on health care abroad in 2017, up from $447 million in 2013. (The federal agency wasn’t able to provide a breakdown of patients seeking medically-necessary procedures and those leaving Canada for cosmetic surgery.)
That worked out to $1.9 million per day in 2017, an increase from $1.2 million per day in 2013.
Of those Canadians seeking health care elsewhere in 2017, the report says the majority were from Ontario, anywhere from as low as 154,000 people to as high as 208,400, based on survey data from Stats Canada.
“One potential solution is for the government to continue to find the publicly available health care system but allow private clinics to provide even more services than what they’re allowed to now,” said Craig.
“So then someone might decide to pay for the service in Canada instead of going abroad. And then if the government did that, more money would stay in the economy here supporting Canadian jobs and those workers and those businesses would pay taxes which could also fund the Canadian health-care system.”
Craig says secondstreet.org’s mandate is to look at “how everyday Canadians are affected by government policies.”
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