Supplementing Health Care With Private Clinics Could Cut Wait Times, Study Finds

A successful Saskatchewan program could serve as a roadmap to tackling the ever-growing issue of long health-care wait times in Canada, says a new study from the Fraser Institute. The province launched the Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative (SSI) in 2010 to address escalating medical wait times by using private clinics for essential non-emergency surgical procedures such as knee and hip replacements. The program was key to reducing Saskatchewan’s waiting times by 47 percent between 2010 and 2014, the study found. There was also a nearly 75 percent reduction in the number of patients waiting for surgery for more than three months. “The success of the Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative offers valuable lessons for policymakers across Canada—and hope for patients—that the unacceptably long waits that plague health-care systems nationwide can be reduced meaningfully with sensible reform,” Fraser Institute senior fellow Nadeem Esmail said in a press release....