Canada Has Fewer Doctors, Hospital Beds Than Comparable Universal Health-Care Systems: Report

Paramedics wheel a patient into the emergency department at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, on Jan. 13, 2021. The Canadian Prss/Cole Burston

Canada’s health-care system does not perform on par with other countries that have universal health care, according to a new report.

The report, titled Comparing Performance of Universal Health Care Countries, 2024, from the Fraser Institute compares 31 high-income countries that have universal health care systems.

It looks at 40 indicators in four categories, including availability of resources, use of resources, access to resources, and quality and clinical performance.

Using 2022 data, the report found that Canada ranked 28 out of 30 when it comes to the availability of doctors, and ranked 25 out of 30 for the number of hospital beds and psychiatric beds open.

The country ranked low for the availability of technology, according to the report, with a 27 out of 31 rank for the number of MRI machines available per one million people and 28 out of 31 for the number of CT scanners available.

Canada also has some of the longest wait times compared to other countries, the report found.

When compared to nine other universal health-care countries, Canada ranked second from the bottom, in eighth place, for the number of patients who had to wait more than a month to see a specialist (65.2 percent).

The country was the lowest out of the nine when looking at the number of patients who had to wait two months or longer for non-emergency surgery (58.3 percent).

Canada ranked six out of nine for the percentage of patients who said cost was a barrier to get access to medical and dental care, the report said.

“There is a clear imbalance between the high cost of Canada’s health-care system and the value Canadians receive—particularly in terms of availability of medical resources and timely access to care,” report co-author Bacchus Barua said in a Nov. 26 news release.

The report also looks at how much Canada spends on health care compared to other high-income Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

It found that Canada spends more than the majority of OECD countries that have universal health-care systems. The country ranked four out of 31 for the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, and ranked nine out of 31 for highest health-care expenditure per capita, the authors wrote.

“The data examined in this report suggest that there is an imbalance between the value Canadians receive and the relatively high amount of money they spend on their healthcare system,” the report authors wrote.

“Although Canada ranks among the most expensive universal-access health-care systems in the OECD, its performance for availability and access to resources is generally below that of the average OECD country, while its performance for use of resources and quality and clinical performance is mixed.”