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Private healthcare fills crucial gaps: Vancouver''s for-profit surgical centres offer treatment-for-pay in place of waiting months or years in public queues.

Article Excerpt
BY CANDIS MCLEAN

One month before his wedding last September, 26-year-old warehouse manager Shawn Coldwell of Vancouver became very ill. He lost his sense of smell and taste and lived in a perpetual fog of exhaustion. Finally, he could no longer work. His wife took on a second job while his parents cared for the infant son he could not tend. A specialist diagnosed allergic fungal sinusitus and recommended surgery. Then came devastating news: he would have to wait five years.

"We couldn't put our lives on hold for half a decade," says Margaret, Mr. Coldwell's wife, "so we looked for options." Surgery in the U.S., they found, could be done immediately for $25,000, or it could be done in Ontario if the couple could wait five months and pay for flights and accommodation.

"Then we called the False Creek Surgical Centre (FCSC) in Vancouver," Ms. Coldwell says, "and within a few days they turned our lives around. Every day Shawn has more energy, and you can see in his eyes the life coming back." Adds Mr. Coldwell, "It feels awesome to breathe!" On compassionate grounds, the clinic waived the facility fee for the three-and-a-half-hour surgery that normally would have cost about $7,000.

The Coldwells are among the growing number of patients who are finding ways to bypass ever-lengthening surgical waiting lists at public hospitals by turning to a handful of private, for-profit multi-specialty surgical facilities scattered across the country. Some Canadians are asking if these private centres are good for the health of individuals, or for the well-being of the country's healthcare system itself. But others argue that effective, timely care will remain a will-o'-the-wisp in Canada unless such facilities are allowed to flourish.

Dr. Amin Javer, who performed Mr. Coldwell's surgery at False Creek, says he would prefer to do all his surgery within the not-for-profit public hospital at which he works, but waiting lists drove him to the private option. "Surgeons at St. Paul's Hospital [in Vancouver]," he explains, "are given three days per month each for surgery, and most of that is taken up by patients with cancer or other acute emergencies." This means that anyone who is not going to die must wait.

Dr. Javer is not suggesting his patients should receive the same priority given to cardiac patients--4% of whom die on the waiting list compared to only one (of respiratory failure) among all Dr. Javer's sinus sufferers--yet it remains a fact that across Canada, lost productivity and enjoyment of life from minor injuries and illnesses is immeasurable. Having worked in for-profit hospitals in the U.S., the physician says the real perk is that patients are seen as an asset, not a debit, for the hospital. "In American hospitals, he says, "every patient is a customer from whom they can make money; here, every patient is seen as...