Canada falling short on access to doctors, hospital beds, MRIs and CT scanners: study

Compared to other countries with universal health care, Canada seems to spend more and get less.

The Fraser Institute released a new study on Tuesday that found Canada has fewer doctors, hospital beds, MRI machines and CT scanners compared to other countries with universal health care, despite high levels of spending.

“There’s a clear imbalance between the high cost of Canada’s health-care system and the actual care Canadians receive in return,” said Mackenzie Moir, senior policy analyst at the Fraser Institute and author of Comparing Performance of Universal Health-Care Countries, 2025.

The study used data from 2023, the latest year of available comparable data. It found that Canada spent more on health care than most other high-income countries with universal health care.

Canada ranked third in spending out of 31 countries but ranked 27th out of 30 countries for the availability of doctors and 25th out of 30 for the availability of hospital beds.

Canada also ranked 27th out of 31 countries for the availability of MRI machines and 28th out of 31 for CT scanners in 2022, the latest year of diagnostic technology data.

Ajibola Okanrenee, the clinical manager at Why Wait imagining, a Halifax-based diagnostic imaging centre, says demand is picking up for their services, following their opening in February.

“We have a lot of people coming in, but primarily they’re looking for answers,” he said. “They’re looking for answers for pain they feel, and basically they want to know what’s going on. And sometimes its the first step for their medical assistance that they need to be provided with.”

Okanrenee says clients come in from across the Maritimes, for their same-day MRI and ultrasounds services.

They aim to get customers their test results back within a 72-hour window.

“We get a lot of patients [telling] us about how they don’t want to wait, hence them coming to us for quicker appointments,” he said.

The study also found that in 2023, Canada ranked last for the percentage of patients able to make same- or next-day appointments when sick (22 per cent) and had the highest percentage of patients (58 per cent) who waited two months or more for non-emergency surgery, among the nine countries with universal health-care systems included in the Commonwealth Fund’s International Health Policy Survey.

“The Canadian health care system is giving taxpayers a raw deal and giving patients very poor access to services. This is the developed world third most expensive universal access health care system,” said Nadeem Esmail, the Fraser Institute’s health policy director.

Esmail said Canadians are leaving without care due to the long wait times across the country.

“Canadians have to wait for every aspect of health care in this country. We have very long waiting times. We know there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians each year now leaving emergency rooms because the wait times are too long. They’re extended waits to get into primary care. This is a problem,” he said.

Esmail also said Atlantic Canada has some of the longest wait times.

“In fact, the problem in Atlantic Canada when it comes to waiting is much worse than the national average, which means, relative to other developed nations, it is in last place by a great big distance.”

The Fraser Institute says allowing for private providers could be a helpful solution.

“The problem in Canada is not how much money we’re spending. We’re spending enough. The problem is the way we’re spending that money in the way the health care system is structured,” says Esmail.

The Fraser Institute is an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.