By Mackenzie Moir and Tegan Hill,
Amid all the noise about tariffs and President Trump, Canadians face other longstanding problems that require swift attention. For example, according to the latest wait times data, British Columbians last year endured the longest wait for non-emergency care ever recorded in the province. The median wait for patients seeking care (across 12 medical specialties) in the province was 29.5 weeks. Not only is this wait nearly two weeks higher than in 2023, it’s almost three times higher than the 10.4 week wait reported in British Columbia in 1993 (the first year wait-time estimates were published).
More specifically, B.C.’s 29.5-week wait in 2024 represents two separate delays—the time it takes to see a specialist after a referral from a GP (15.0 weeks) and the time between seeing a specialist and receiving treatment (14.4 weeks).
That total wait for treatment varied depending on the type of care. For example, last year B.C. patients could expect a particularly long wait for orthopedic surgeries including hip and knee replacements (53.6 weeks) and treatments for the nose, ears and throat (45.8 weeks).
Clearly, the Eby government’s new Health Minister Josie Osborne must break the status quo maintained by former health minister Adrian Dix and finally implement reforms to help reduce wait times.
So what’s the solution for these long waits?
To start, the government should expand contracts with private clinics to deliver more publicly funded services to patients. For this reform, B.C. can learn from Australia’s universal health-care system, which outperforms Canada’s system on several key metrics and has embraced the private sector in the delivery of care. In fact, Australia has contracted with private hospitals to provide care since the early 1990s, with more than 300,000 episodes of publicly funded care occurring in Australian private hospitals in 2021/22.
Additionally, the Eby government could reform the way its pays public hospitals.
In most of Canada, public hospitals are expected to operate within a set budget each year, regardless of the level of services they provide. As a result, hospitals are not incentivized to treat additional patients or provide more care (as doing so would be a drain on their budgets). By contrast, more successful universal health-care countries pay hospitals for the services they provide. In other words, by making the amount and level of services a source of hospital revenue, hospitals are incentivized to treat more patients. Quebec is already moving in this direction, and plans to fund all hospital care this way by 2027/28.
In the face of brutal health-care wait times, if B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne wants to help provide relief for B.C. patients and their families, she must change course and learn from other more successful universal health-care systems.
Mackenzie Moir and Tegan Hill are economists with the Fraser Institute.
