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Well, I live in the USA and at Kaiser in Northern California. It takes 6 to 7 months to get a knee replaced same thing with hip replacement. I was able to get my knee replaced in three months in March because people had canceled and I was able to get into their spot. Last year, hip replacement took six months to get it done. If I wasn’t at Kaiser, I could get it done quicker, But they have much better free treatment after that surgery. A PT shows up at your house within Two days and you get biweekly visits. Something you don’t get, if you get treatment outside of Kaiser
I needed to have surgery on a cyst on my face and it was a 2.5 month wait. It started getting bigger, so I finally decided to get it removed, not so fast dude!!!!
One major difference Is that there are many more treatments for cancer than in Canada? There are also tests that are approved here that are not approved in Canada.
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Yes, Canada also lags in drug approvals, but that's unrelated to universal vs private healthcare.
Pharma companies put all their resources into pursuing approvals in the big markets first (especially the U.S. and European Union), then they go for the mid-sized markets like Canada a couple of years later. We'd be in the same situation if we had a private healthcare system; it's just global economics at work.
For example, Orgovyx wasn't approved in Canada until fall 2023, and didn't become widely available until early 2024 (I was one of the first patients on it; my pharmacy hadn't even heard of it yet when I brought in my prescription). Likewise, I needed special authorisation from the Ontario Ministry of Health to start on Apalutamide in fall 2021 — it was already approved by Health Canada, but didn't make it into the Ontario formulary until early 2022.
To make up for that, the drug manufacturers generally offer "patient-access programmes" that provide critical, life-saving cancer drugs for free during the gap between Health Canada approval and when they show up in the provincial formularies.