The Availability of Medical Technology in Canada: An International Comparative Study" (Fraser Institute, August 1999)
It is not simply a question of injecting more money in the system. While we should expect that the price of medical services would get lower with time because of technology, it seems that with public health care the exact contrary is observed.
In Canada, there is no correlation between health budgets of various provinces and waiting times, and waiting times in the country have ballooned while spending has risen. Between 1993 and 1998, while the health care spending per capita has risen by 77$, the average waiting time have risen from 9.95 weeks to 14.21 weeks (for a statistical study of the relation between spending and effect in Canada, see "Spend More, Wait Less", Martin Zelder, 2000).
The issue of medical resources being used as political tools is not documented to my knowledge, although it is part of socialized medicine here in Canada. Thus we observe phenomena such as shortages of beds, which would make no sense in a private system.
All these phenomena are also observed when comparing with other countries. Only 5% of Americans wait more than four months to receive surgery, compared to 23% in Australia, 27% in Canada, 26% in New Zealand, and 38% in the UK ("Comparison of Health Care System Views and Experiences in Five Nations, 2001", Commonwealth Fund 2001 International Health Policy Survey).
In the UK, more than a million people wait on the lists and one-quarter of cardiac patients actually die before it is their turn to be called in ("The million-year wait", Adam Smith Institute, 2002). In Sweden, the only private hospital there, St. Gorans, operates at 15% less cost than the Swedish public hospitals.
There are many other issues turning around health care, such as insurance and drug prices, two issues heavily affected by free trade and state intervention. For instance, the American government's privileges granted to work insurance over personal insurance has hurt the poor, and so will their new policy of drug protectionism. The state is the enemy of the less fortunate, and nowhere is this more true. The poor are less healthy, and pariahs regardless of the system, because it is always politically-motivated.
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