In Canada, everyone has access to high-quality medical care at a reasonable tax rate. This implies that every citizen or permanent resident of Canada is eligible to enrol in the country’s universal health care system. A healthcare system’s services and supplies are covered differently by each province and territory. Be familiar with the specifics of your plan, as there are notable distinctions between them. A health card will be issued to you whenever your province or territory enrols you in their health care system. Don’t need emergency care? Present this card to receive routine medical care at a hospital or clinic.
It’s hard to put a price on Canada’s public healthcare system even in good times. Even more so during the current worldwide epidemic, but it hasn’t stopped Fraser Institute experts from attempting. Canadians have a hard time conceptualising the full cost of public health care, according to a recent analysis titled The Price of Public Health Care Insurance, 2021 by Nathaniel Li, Milagros Palacios, and Bacchus Barua. The common fallacy that health care in Canada is free rather than paid for through taxes persists in part because Canadians do not pay directly for their health care, and in part because it is difficult to determine the value of their contribution to public health care insurance.
It was said in the study that “[Canadians] contribute a large amount of money for health care through the country’s tax system.” Since there is no “specific” health insurance tax, estimating the quantity of these payments can be difficult. Based on projected tax rates and other information, the paper calculated the projected average cost of public health care insurance for six representative types of Canadian families in 2021. For one-parent families with two kids, the number was $3,842 and for two-parent families with two kids, it was $15,039.
The research estimates the following expenditures for public health insurance for various other sorts of families: It costs $3,909 for a single parent with one child, $4,296 for a single person, $13,533 for a couple without kids, and $13,746 for a couple with one child and two parents. The organisation also calculated income-based estimates of how much it costs families to pay for health insurance. It was determined that people in the bottom 10% of the income distribution (with an average cash income of $18,686) will pay an anticipated $726 for health insurance this year, while those in the top 10% (with an average cash income of $286,808) are expected to spend $41,916.
In the middle decile, whose annual cash income averages $75,300, the cost of public health insurance was predicted to be $6,521. The authors also projected that the average Canadian family’s premiums for public health insurance would increase by 177.6% between 1997 and 2021. They calculated that this rate was equivalent to a 3.4-fold rise in the cost of clothes, a 2.2-fold increase in the cost of food, a 1.7-fold increase in the cost of accommodation, and a 1.6-fold increase in average income during the same time period.
The report acknowledged that due to data constraints, the estimated healthcare expenditures paid should be viewed with caution. However, it also points out that the economic response to COVID-19 had distorted estimates of income and total taxes for different sorts of Canadian households. The research emphasised that current projections of households’ total tax liability in 2021 “do not account for deficits, which will have to be paid for by taxes on future generations.”