Until that point, I’d never looked too closely at our health-care system. My own need of it had been minimal over the years. As a journalist, I’d kept an eye on some of the big-picture stories and issues, and was generally aware that our national fondness of the system is more rooted in mythology than metrics — Canadian health care consumes huge financial resources to produce mediocre outcomes relative to other advanced countries, and this has long been obvious to anyone who paid even the slightest attention … which is, alas, not many of us.
In a piece this week in the National Post, Vitor Marciano took a hard look at our ICU capacity and correctly noted that the Canadian system is tiny — a major contributing factor to the worst parts of our pandemic response has been that we have very little margin of error in our system. Marciano’s piece focused mostly on hospital and ICU capacity, which is sensible, given the current crisis in western Canada. But the problems with our health-care system go far beyond that.
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