Waiting for surgery can hit you hard in the wallet: study

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – If you have ever had to wait for surgery, you know how difficult it can be emotionally and physically.

But numbers from the Fraser Institute suggest is can also cost Canadians cold hard cash.

Looking at the big picture, long waits for surgeries and medical treatments last year cost Canadian patients plenty of cash in lost income and productivity.

“When we add up the lost value of time during the work week for patients, that adds up to about $1.2 billion for the Canadian economy,” says Bacchus Barua, senior economist with the Fraser Institute. “That works out to about $1,300 per patient, so long as we stick just to the average work week.”

By comparison, patients in BC lost just over $1,500 in productivity while waiting for surgery.

“But once you add all those costs up, it adds up to about $200 million for British Columbia in 2014,” says Barua.

Barua says countries with shorter wait times fund their hospitals based on activity, rather than global budgets; have a larger role for the private sector; and have some form of posturing with exemptions for people with lower incomes or the chronically ill.

“This is not to say that any one of these things on their own will solve Canada’s wait-times problem but it would be prudent for us to look at what mixture of these three works in other countries and what mixture might work for the Canadian economy.”

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