Telemedicine has greatly improved our access to health services. Instead of spending hours hanging around in a clinic waiting room, we can chat with our doctor in a short video call, which means we have fewer questions before consulting. Unfortunately, Ottawa seems determined to clip the wings of these nascent initiatives.
In a letter sent to the health ministers of the 13 provinces and territories, the federal government says they have until 2026 to cover all costs associated with telemedicine or end the practice.
The first problem this raises is the use of resources. It’s no secret that the health care system is very expensive. This year alone, the Quebec government expects to spend $62 billion on it. That’s $5 billion more than the government expects to collect in personal and corporate income taxes. It’s also almost 50% more than when Premier François Legault took office.
Despite this colossal spending, our health care system is struggling to meet the needs of Quebecers. When you need surgery, you have to wait months. Last year, more than one in ten patients who went to the province’s emergency rooms left before being treated — including a worrying proportion of cases deemed urgent or worse. And there are still 2.3 million of us who don’t have a family doctor.
The government already has enough fires to put out in the health care system without Ottawa imposing the responsibility of covering telemedicine bills. This would add one more area in the choice of allocation of our limited health care resources.
The Legault government also recognizes this. When questioned on this subject, a spokesperson for Health Minister Christian Dubé stated that “the changes envisaged by the federal government would have a negative impact on access to care for hundreds of thousands of Quebecers.”
This is partly because every patient who uses a telemedicine service is one less patient our health-care system has to care for. A McMaster University study published last December confirms that the increased use of these services during the pandemic has helped reduce pressure on clinics and emergency rooms across the country.
It is important to recognize that telemedicine is one of the few aspects of our health care system that works well.
Telemedicine allows more than 10 million Canadians registered in such a program, as part of their health insurance, to put an end to this calculation that we have all already made between the choice of going to see a doctor for an illness or avoiding losing a day of work to spend it in the waiting room of a clinic.
This choice between consulting or avoiding losing a day remains an all too common reality for patients in this country. Many Canadian patients have already given up on the idea of going to see their doctor because of excessive wait times at walk-in clinics. In a way, what these people are admitting is that they preferred to continue suffering from an illness and hope that it would go away on its own, rather than having to spend four, five or six hours in a doctor’s waiting room.
With telemedicine, what used to be a waste of most of a day has become a matter of minutes. In fact, it’s one of the main selling points that telemedicine providers use when convincing employers to provide it to their employees. One of the largest providers estimates that patients using its platform save an average of just over four hours of sick time for each visit.
It’s no wonder, then, that the expansion of telemedicine services is well-regarded by Canadians, garnering the support of 79 per cent of us according to a recent Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of Global News.
Unfortunately, by requiring the provinces to cover these facts, Ottawa is putting these advances at risk. Instead of trying to impose its vision on one of the few effective aspects of our health system, the federal government should leave telemedicine alone.