Still waiting.

• Author: Miyake, Joanna

It's nice to be included. In Canada we usually sit on the sidelines and observe American angst about large issues such as Vietnam, drugs, and urban decay. It's not that we don't have problems of our own, it's just that (in the absence of intensive media hype) our problems never seem as large or as dramatic. But in health care we finally have found a common concern.

Best of all, America has taken a real interest in our health-care system, an interest we are well aware of because Canadians are exposed to essentially the same media as Americans. The Canadian media have drawn further attention to the American news coverage by running stories about it. One local television station tracked down a number of the Canadians interviewed for the Walter Cronkite documentary Cross Border Medicine and stopped just short of asking them about the thrill of being interviewed by an American network news teams.

The attention has been flattering, but unfortunately we were unprepared. Because the Canadian medical system is not a business, statistics on cost, price, and service were not available.

Consider waiting lists, one quirk of the Canadian medical system that attracted a lot of attention but was not well documented. Waiting lists exist in hospital mainframe computers and on surgeon's ledgers, but these data are rarely gathered and studied. Prior to 1989, the last attempt to document the waiting lists for specialists was by the Ontario Medical Association in 1982. Despite public concern, we found evidence of only three other papers studying the waiting-list phenomenon in Canada. One was written in 1967, which gives you an idea of how old the problem is; a second covered only three operations; and the last was a short American study.

Since 1989, the Fraser Institute, an independent Canadian think tank, has been attempting to fill this information void. In 1991 we published a report on the TABULAR DATA OMITTED findings of a pilot study in British Columbia. In this pilot project we developed a mail survey that we sent to specialists in 10 areas of practice. We asked them about the average wait and the number of patients waiting for 58 common procedures. Based on their responses, we determined the average wait for each specialist and for each procedure. Then-President George Bush used our estimate of the average wait for coronary-bypass surgery in his speech outlining health-care policy.

The following year we mailed an improved version of this survey to...