Since 2023, the British Columbia government has spent $16 million to send cancer patients to Washington State for radiation therapy due to delays in the province. And while BC Cancer, which is part of the province’s health services authority, says more patients are being treated within the four-week benchmark (compared to last December), the number of British Columbians being treated in a timely manner remains below the national average.

And it’s not just patients being treated for cancer that face long waits in B.C. According to the Canadian Institute for Health information, the province failed to meet all wait times benchmarks in 2023. For example, for knee replacements only 57 per cent of patients. and for hip replacements only 65 per cent of patients, were treated within wait-time guidelines.

More broadly, in 2023 B.C. patients faced a median wait of 27.7 weeks from GP referral to a specialist to treatment, the longest in the province since 1993 (when national estimates were first published). And this measure doesn’t include the wait time to see their GP in the first place, assuming they have one. In 2022, according to polling data, 36 per cent of B.C. residents said they had difficulty getting a doctor’s appointment, with nearly one million B.C. residents not having one at all.

For B.C. patients seeking radiation therapy, a critical part of cancer treatment, the total wait in 2023 was 9.1 weeks, double the national average.

All things considered, B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix should be commended for recognizing the reality of wait times in B.C. and sending patients seeking cancer treatment over the border to Washington.

However, a better approach would be to learn from other countries with universal health care that deliver more timely care. Take Australia, for example, where less of the economy is spent on universal health care yet the country has more health-care workers and diagnostic technology than Canada. And more Australian patients report timelier access to doctor appointments (at 54 per cent) and non-emergency surgical care (72 per cent) compared to Canada (38 and 62 per cent, respectively).

The problem isn’t that we don’t spend enough money; in fact we are already one of the top spenders on universal health care in the developed world. The problem lies in how we approach universal care. Australia has long understood the valuable role of the private sector in enhancing universal health-care delivery. In fact, Australia has used private hospitals to deliver publicly-funded care since the early 1990s, with 41 per cent of hospital services occurring in private facilities in 2021/22 (the latest year of available data).

But we don’t need to imagine what a similar system could look like in Canada; we have proof from recent history By utilizing, among other things, private clinics to deliver publicly-funded procedures, Saskatchewan reduced that province’s total wait for surgery from 26.5 weeks (the longest wait outside Atlantic Canada) in 2010 to 14.2 weeks (the shortest next to Ontario) by 2014.

Quebec has had similar success. The province increasingly relies on private surgical clinics as part of universal health care in the province. The percentage of publicly-funded day surgeries performed in private clinics in Quebec increased from 6.1 per cent in 2011/12 to 17.1 per cent in 2022/23.

The result? More timely access to care for patients in Quebec and Saskatchewan.

For policymakers in every province and territory, examples abroad and experiments at home offer a better way forward for our health-care system.