Canada is in a health care crisis. What’s the prescription?

A recent Ipsos poll recently revealed that less than half of Canadians are pleased with their public health care system.

I say revealed but it shouldn’t be a revelation to anyone in Canada. I don’t know a single person that is currently happy with the state of things. But the reasons why are complex.

Take, for example, spending on health care. That same Ipsos poll notes 38 percent of Canadians believe that investments in their provincial health care system over the last decade have had no impact, with approximately 30 percent believing the system has deteriorated over the same period.

“We are in a time of the worst health care crisis we’ve seen in Canada. It is really close to a collapse of the system across the country.”
– Brett Belchetz,
Maple CEO

I happen to live in a province where the premier is about $21.3 billion short in funding allocation for both current health care programs and expansion plans. Now, this premier has a history of underutilizing available resources, failing to fully spend COVID-19 response program funding or use local startups able to help vaccinate the province.

This premier has quietly increased funding to private hospitals run by his donors, however, and passed a bill allowing private clinics to conduct more surgeries.

Oh, I’ve gone and done it now, laying my hands on the third rail of Canadian health care: the public vs. private debate.

Dr. Brett Belchetz, CEO of Maple, is familiar with the sting of its current. Maple and similar virtual health-care providers are currently the target of Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos, ostensibly because patients are being charged for virtual visits with their family physician.

But wait, isn’t this the exact same type of service that we were all praising during the height of the (still-ongoing) pandemic? So is the issue the tech behind the care or the fact that Maple doesn’t have equal access to those all-too-important provincially subsidized billing codes?

Oh and political handwringing over my premier’s good faith or otherwise openness towards privatized health care aside, in fairness, I must mention that Ontario actually ranked second-lowest among those surveyed in that Ipsos poll regarding doubt in the system. None of this makes sense.

As Dr. Alexandra Greenhill, CEO of Careteam Technologies, notes on this episode, we can’t provide a prescription without a proper diagnosis first. She’s joined by Dr. Belchetz to do just that.

Let’s dig in.

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The BetaKit Podcast is hosted by Douglas Soltys & Rob Kenedi. Edited by Kattie Laur. Sponsored by Goodlawyer.