The report reviews a range of policies that countries have used to tackle waiting times for different services, including elective surgery and primary care consultations, but also cancer care and mental health services, with a focus on identifying the most successful ones.

Public opinion polls in recent years show that Canadians are generally satisfied with their government-funded health care system. If there is any consistent source of dissatisfaction with the “single-payer” system, it is with the amount of time people wait to receive medical care. Requiring patients to queue for medical services presumably saves the government money, at least in the short-run, by reducing expenditures on hospitals and doctors. However, waiting lists impose monetary and non-monetary costs on those waiting for health care. The larger these costs, the more likely it is that waiting lists have net overall costs for Canadian society. What can and should be done to reduce or eliminate wait times for health care? Reducing Wait Times for Health Care: What Canada Can Learn from Theory and International Experience assesses various policy-related issues associated with waiting lists for health care services in Canada. First, Nadeem Esmail attempts to define what “waiting” for health care means and considers the complexities involved in comparing wait times from one country to another. In chapter 3, Dr. Brian Day examines the substantial costs that waiting for health care impose on Canadians. David Henderson then considers various policy approaches for reducing wait times in Canada, while in chapter 5, Steven Globerman addresses the labour market consequences of wait times and the broader impacts of wait times for Canada's economic growth. Finally, in chapter 6 of this volume, Nadeem Esmail reviews the international experience with wait times and reductions in wait times in an effort to identify policies that might work to improve the timeliness of access to health care in Canada. A key point for Canadian policymakers emerges from the chapters in this book: maintaining status quo health care policies is unlikely to improve the timeliness of the provision of health care services in Canada or improve the efficiency of the government-funded system.

This book provides a framework to understand why there are waiting lists for elective surgery in some OECD countries and not in others. It also describes how waiting times are measured in OECD countries and reviews different policy approaches to tackling excessive waiting times.

The Canadi- ing for-profit clinics to sell services to the public an debate has wrongly assumed that the only such sector and to any individual who has the cash to clinics are for-profit businesses. [...] Most the ultrasound, and sometimes the biopsy as well, patients are more than happy to see the first avail- on the same day. [...] They are aggressively de- The second new public sector approach to veloping for-profit clinics to sell services to the health care waits is the use of applications of public sector and any individual who has the cash queueing theory to manage waits and delays. [...] But the appropriate solution, in this case, is to increase the capacity of the in a peer-reviewed journal, and the physicians' public hospitals and clinics. [...] For The waits in the arena are longer if all the fans example, 10% of patients booked for ultrasound come just before the game starts, and may be non- examinations at the QEII Hospital in Halifax existent if people arrive in a constant stream dur- in July 2005 did not show up for their appoint- ing the hour prior to game time.

Ask what makes Canada different from the United States, and health care is sure to come up. Interestingly, though, Canadians and insured Americans are about equally likely to report unmet needs for health care in the past year.