Last month, a video was trending on social media showing a Canadian woman explaining that she had a 13-month wait for a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test to check for a brain tumor.

On X, formerly known as Twitter, community notes popped up to say that the video was misleading. “Priority is decided by physicians, not the province,” wrote one commenter. Another noted that wait times did vary by province.

None of this, however, detracts from the core truths:

  • Canadian health care is not free and it has two prices:
    • the taxes Canadians pay for it
    • and the wait times that make Canadians pay in the form of service rationing.

Canada’s publicly provided health care system actually requires rationing in order to contain costs. Because services are offered at no monetary price, demand exceeds the available supply of doctors, equipment, and facilities. If the different provinces (which operate most health care services) wanted to meet the full demand, each would have to raise taxes significantly to fund services. To keep expenditures down (managing the imbalance from public provision) and thus taxes as well, the system relies on rationing through wait times rather than prices.

The rationing keeps many patients away from care facilities or encourages them to avoid dealing with minor but nevertheless problematic ailments. These costs are not visible in taxes paid for health care, but they are true costs that matter to people.

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Source Zero Hedge