That is:
What is the aggregate national budget for the system (which, I know, is administered by the provinces)?
How does the cost break down per capita? That is, how many dollars of your taxes each year go towards public health insurance?
(Just things I was wondering in connection with this GD thread.)
You might want to check this page:
This news article might also help:
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2006/12/05/health-spending-061205.html?ref=rss
Another way of looking at - the effect on an individual tax-payer:
I pay about 40% of my gross income in income tax (yes, 40% of my gross).
About half of that, 20% of my gross, goes for the Provincial (Ontario) income tax.
More than one-third of Ontario’s budget goes towards health care. So, I assume, that just over one-third of the income tax that I pay to Ontario goes for health care, i.e. just over one-third of 20% ==> about 7% of my gross income.
That’s quite a lot for “free” health care.
Karl, the American governments actually spend more per capita on health-care than the Canadian governments do.
I don’t disagree. Just pointing out that health care is awfully expensive in Canada, too.
The governments or the people via private insurance? I know that the American system as a whole is a lot more costly than the Canadian system, and a lot of this is due to inefficiencies, not quantities that actually pay directly for medical care. For example in Ontario, there aren’t 30 different insurance companies paying 30 different sets of employees with all of their different rules for payment. On the other hand, competition probably makes each of these 30 different insurance companies a lot more efficient than a government-run system.
No one knows how to resolve these differences, otherwise we’d have some type of national health care system by now, too. In the meantime, the influx of money from disaffected Canadians who are prohibited by law from having private insurance in Canada (except Quebec, apparently) help support our system, too. 
The only thing that really means anything is a cost/benefit analysis and that hasn’t been done as far as I know. It is very complicated as well. Americans with adequate or good health insurance have the finest care in the world. I know my family has needed it through a series of unfortunate circumstances in the last 5 years (now over) and cost our insurance companies close to $1,000,000. We got very exceptional care and outstanding treatment (even involving in-hospital apartments with 24 hour service for patient and family for weeks and months at a time).
The U.S. already has universal health care and has for some time. Medicare and Medicaid take care of vulnerable people. Hospital emergency rooms provide an open door for anyone at anytime for anything and many people without the means or insurance take them up on it.
I know that the U.S. system is very inefficient and that offends me a a professional level because my job is working out effieciencies. My only point is that you always have to know the problem you are addressing and the outcome you seek to achieve to get anywhere and people tend to stray far afield when it comes to this issue.
I disagree and as is traditional in GQ, cite?
Medicare and Medicaid have eligibility requirements that allow a lot of people to fall through the cracks. Emergency rooms are open and required to stabilize people in emergency situations, but the “for anything” part of your statement is not true, and is an important distinction for people with serious but chronic rather than acute conditions.
How the heck do you pay 20% of your gross income in Ontario income tax when the highest marginal income tax rate in Ontario is 11%? I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to pay 40% of your gross in income tax in Ontario.
Of course, if you really want to calculate how much of your income is going to the provincial health care budget, you need to add in sales tax and federal transfers.
I was using the assumption that AFTER SURCHAGES etc, the Ontarion and Federal income tax levies on me are roughly equal. And, within margins of approximations, I stand by what I said. Look here.
As I said, it isn’t efficient. No one gets turned away from an emergency room. If you have a chronic condition and want to complain that things have flared up, the emergency rooms will take you. They can’t refuse you for lack of payment by law. It would be terrible going there every time your condition worsened but you can do it. It won’t work worth a damned for very serious, chronic conditions but that still doesn’t make the overall point false.
There are Charity Hospitals, state hospitals, VA hospitals, state programs, and foundations that can help. Again, it may be terribly inconvenient and you may have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to your name, but you still get care. I grew up with some of the poorest of the poor and they got cancer, dialysis, and diabetes treatments just like everybody else. My nanny who was the sweetest lady under the sun died a couple of months ago and had chronic conditions for the last 50 years of her life. She lived in a nursing home with constant care for the last 10 despite making 50 dollars a week from us when I was growing up.
I would say yes, definitely, we have universal care but you may need it to sap away all your money before the free stuff kicks in.
Ah. Taxes that aren’t called taxes. Still, at a top marginal rate of 46% that you only hit at 120 grand (more actually once you take into account RRSPs and the like), I’d think you’d have to be making 200k or more to actually get to 40%. I paid 12% of my gross, though granted I had a crappy year income-wise. I’ll probably be closer to 17% next year.
Shagnasty, in a way I agree with your second post. I guess the difference with Canada is more of a universal health security vs. universal health care provision. But I think this thread is best served now by focusing on the OP question of costs in Canada, because there’s no way I am up for a Great Debates healthcare thread over the finer points.
Well, I do make a good buck :o and I hope it didn’t seem as if I was complaining. Still, it wasn’t until I finished “Grade 27” that I began to make anything much more than minimum wage. So, if you spread out my current income over even some of the years of my post-secondary school training, what I’m earning now doesn’t seem quite as grand.
From a previous discussion: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5514601&postcount=36
Naw, it’s all good. 
But with median family income in Canada at around $55k (2003 census figures), the middle of the road Canadian pays something closer to 25% of gross income in income taxes. According to my very, very rough math. If you don’t fall somewhere reasonably close to an average category, then we can’t really use your case as an indication of what an average Canadian is paying into the health care budget.
I suppose we could significantly reduce how much we pay in taxes if we significantly reduce the level of pay of medical professionals.
What say ye to that, Karl?
(I’m just pulling your leg. If I had my way, medical education would be better subsidized.)
And I think in that same thread I pointed out how misleading those figures are. Using overall life expectancy as a measure of how good your health care system is is a very poor measure when comparing two countries with very different demographics. For example, Americans tend to be more overweight than Canadians, and weight has a big influence on life expectancy. Differences in diet, working conditions, climate, ethnic background, poverty, average age, and a host of other confounding variables make this a poor comparison.
If you actually want to compare the two health care systems, you’re much better off actually comparing the life expectancy of people AFTER they have been admitted to the health care system with serious problems. Life expectancy rates for various cancers is a better metric. Deaths from secondary heart attacks after being treated for the first one. Those sort of measures. And when you do, suddenly the U.S. looks a lot better than the life expectancy figures would suggest.
Then, if you want to compare private health care vs government-provided health care, you need to somehow control for the fact that a large percentage of U.S. health care is already socialized through Medicaid, Medicare, and Veteran’s hospitals. So you could start doing studies between a private hospital that treats a low percentage of medicaid and medicare people, and a similar hospital in Canada that has mostly a middle-upper class patient base (if you can find one).
Finally, you need to consider that a large percentage of health care spending is on non life-threatening conditions that wouldn’t impact the life expectancy figures but which have a great deal to do with the quality of life of people who need the system. Joint replacement surgery, cataract surgery, prosthetics, broken bone and torn ligament treatment, etc.
It’s not so simple as saying, “Americans spend more, yet have lower life expectancy.” How about asking if, by spending more, they get faster treatment? They do, by a wide margin. The kinds of waiting lists we have in Canada are virtually unheard-of in the U.S.
This latter category is where socialized medicine usually does a horrible job. Absent the ability to ration with the market, the government winds up rationing medical care by fiat through restricting resources. It’s not unusual in Canada for people with broken fingers and arms to wait days in an emergency room before getting treatment - often so long that the broken bone has begun to knit and has to be re-broken and set to be fixed. There was just an article in our local paper about a patient who had to sleep on a gurney in the hall of the ER for several WEEKS because there were no beds available for him.
My mother is almost blind due to cataracts and macular degeneration. She’s now in her third year of treatment because of the multi-month wait between procedures. That’s three years of maybe the last 10 productive years of her life spent sitting in the dark in her home. Had she been in the states and adequately insured, she would have been through the system in a few months. My grandmother needed a knee replacement when she was around 60, and she didn’t get it for years. That’s years I spent watching her grimace in pain as she tried to climb a step or sit in a chair. She planned to travel the world in her retirement, but she was basically crippled and stayed home. After she got the joint replacement, she was like a new woman - happy and spry, and ready to take on the world. Then she died of a stroke. The system failed her utterly.
Canada’s health care system does some things well, and some things very poorly. Because it’s so politicized, there are big distortions in allocation of funds. A hospital in the district of a powerful politician may be first-rate. Another hospital in an area that needs a good one even more may be under-staffed and decrepit, because there are no advocates for it in government.
Anyone who is up for it, see here.