How And Why Is It Being Challenged And How Should We Respond?

Canadian Medicare: how and why is it being challenged and how should we respond?
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Canadian Medicare: how and why is it being challenged and how should we respond?
The Canadian Medicare is being challenged because of several reasons that make it a little ineffective in comparison to other high-income countries’ healthcare system. One of how the Canadian Medicare is being challenged is concerned with the long wait time. While the Canadian Medicare is performing better regarding healthcare spending when compared to the U.S. (Busby, Muthukumaran, & Jacobs, 2018), this is not an indication that the system is better off because the long wait time for services causes drags in the delivery of healthcare services. Long wait times have been a cause of concern for some time now, raising questions on what can be done to improve the system about the long wait time to improve delivery of services.
Long wait times have been a cause of concern mostly because it is affecting the health outcomes of Canadians. Patients have problems accessing family physicians, MRIs, specialist appointments, and CTs (Busby, Muthukumaran, & Jacobs, 2018). Such delays in access to some of the important health care services can lead to detrimental health outcomes for patients. Other than poor health outcomes, Canadians have lost faith in the system, which was designed to ensure universal accessibility of health care services, regardless of the financial abilities of Canadians. Flood, Marchildon, and Paech (2018) indicates that throughout several years, the attitude of Canadians about the quality of care has changed to negative, despite the strong support for a system that focuses on the urgency and needs rather than financial ability.
In some cases, these delays and long waits put the health of the patient at risk, which has resulted in lawsuits on several occasions. Such lawsuits put the Canadian government in a bad position and further, damages the good that the healthcare system was designed to do, making long wait a relevant issue that needs to be addressed by the government through healthcare reforms. With such long wait times, patients get frustrated and can place their frustration on nurses and other healthcare professionals, yet their hands are tied. This puts a strain on the nurse-patient relationship and can explain why Canada has more nursing care complaints than other high-income countries, as revealed by Busby, Muthukumaran, and Jacobs (2018). In short, the long wait times have also affected the relationship between patients and nurses, leading to a low engagement, which leads to ineffective delivery of care.
Background
The Canadian Medicare was designed to ensure that access to health care services was based on need rather than the ability to pay, to ensure that all Canadians had access to healthcare services. This is what has made Canadian Medicare better than that of the U.S. regarding universal accessibility and health care spending. Since the 70s, Canada has made progress to get where it is right now regarding accessibility and has outdone countries such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the past (Flood, Marchildon, &Paech, 2018). However, the Canadian health care system is unique because unli...