Canadian Doctors for Medicare: Fraser Institute report on wait times flawed

Canadian Doctors for Medicare E-News November 2013 

CDM: Fraser Institute report on wait times flawed

Dr. Ryan Meili questions the usefulness of the Fraser Institute’s latest report on wait times in the National Post.

The Fraser Institute’s annual wait times report is based on a survey, not objective data, and it looks only at specialists providing elective surgeries, ignoring Canada’s good record with acute and emergency surgeries. Respondents are therefore self-selected, and responses are solicited with the incentive of winning an iPad.

CDM knows that this isn’t a credible way to gather data on wait times. We can be doing better on wait times, but we should be looking at the evidence, not surveys of a self-selected group, to tell us how we’re doing.


 National Post

But some question the Fraser Institute report and the conclusions of its authors.
“It is the same old sky-is-falling report,” said Dr. Ryan Meili, a family physician in Saskatoon who is vice-chairman of Canadian Doctors For Medicare.
“Wait times don’t get shorter when you introduced more delivery of care outside of the public system, they get longer. You don’t just draw patients away from the public system, you also draw away providers,” he said.
Dr. Michael Rachlis, a health policy analyst associated with the Canadian Health Coalition, a pro-universal-healthcare organization, said the co-payment plans from abroad “which allow some people to jump the queue” is not the answer to Canada’s wait times.
“We do tend to wait too long but it has nothing to do with us having a public system. It has a lot to do with how we organize services,” Dr. Rachlis said. “We can eliminate virtually every wait time by better management.”
The institute’s (Fraser) questionnaire was sent to practitioners between the beginning of January and the end of April. The response rate to the surveys was 21%.