Quite a few:
usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-08-03/canadians-increasingly-come-to-us-for-health-care
excerpt:
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The Fraser Institute, a Canadian public policy think tank, estimates that 52,513 Canadians received non-emergency medical treatment in the U.S. and other countries in 2014, a 25 percent jump from the roughly 41,838 who sought medical care abroad the previous year.
In citing those numbers in its 2015 report, “Leaving Canada for Medical Care,” the organization said difficulties in obtaining timely medical care at home is, increasingly, leading Canadians to seek it abroad. “It is possible [they] may have left the country to avoid some of the adverse medical consequences of waiting for care, such as worsening of their condition, poorer outcomes following treatment, disability, or death,” the report says. “Some may leave simply to avoid delay and to make a quicker return to normal life.”
Canadians could expect to wait 9.8 weeks for medically necessary treatment after seeing a specialist in 2014, the researchers found, three weeks more than the time physicians considered to be clinically “reasonable.”
The public health care system sends some Canadians abroad for treatment partly because of a lack of available local resources, the report says.
Ontario, the country’s most populous province, provides a good example. The three hospitals that use stem-cell therapy to treat patients with blood disorders and aggressive cancers like the one that Sharon Shamblaw battled are unable to keep up with the soaring demand. So patients are sent to medical facilities in Buffalo, Cleveland, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, for the potentially life-saving treatment.
“We don’t yet have the capacity to serve all the patients who require allogeneic stem-cell transplants,” says Dr. Michael Sherar, president and CEO of Cancer Care Ontario, referring to the treatment that uses donor stem cells. He describes the arrangement with the U.S. facilities as “an interim solution” and says it will likely end within two years, when Canadian centers have the necessary personnel, infrastructure and funding in place. “Working out all these things takes time,” he says. “Capacity cannot be increased overnight.”**
