The Cost of Instant Access to Health Care
- From the Institute for Health & Aging, University of California, San Francisco.
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
IN THIS ISSUE of THE JOURNAL, Bell and colleagues1 report a comparison of waiting times and charges for several well-defined and commonly used health care services in acute care hospitals in Canada and the United States. The authors conducted a telephone survey of 18 Canadian and 48 US hospitals in cities having a population of more than 500000 and inquired about the availability and cost to consumers for 7 diagnostic and therapeutic procedures (prothrombin time measurement, 12-lead electrocardiography, screening mammography, screening colonoscopy, magnetic resonance imaging of the head, a session of hemodialysis, and total knee replacement surgery), assuming that patients in both countries would be willing and able to pay out-of-pocket for such services. The authors found that compared with Canadian hospitals, US hospitals had significantly shorter median waiting times to obtain 4 of these services and had significantly higher median charges for 6 services.
Although the study by …
