Health-care spending in Canada is slowing drastically after seeing massive jumps during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report.
The 26th annual expenditure survey from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), released Thursday, finds that Canada will spend $311 billion on health care this year, $11.8 billion of which will be spent in Manitoba.
Despite that number, Manitoba’s provincial per-person spending average — $8,400 — lags behind the national mark of $8,563.
CIHI’s manager of health expenditures, Chris Kuchciak, told 680 CJOB’s The Start that hospitals and doctors combine for nearly four-10ths of that spending. Physicians, in particular, are making up a bigger chunk of the total compared with the past few years.
Care that didn’t happen during the pandemic is coming back, he said.
“(There’s) a pickup in the pace of growth for payment for physician services, hospitals thinking about catching up on backlogs for elective surgeries … so that’s driving growth going forward.”
On the national level, Canada’s Maritime provinces are spending more per person this year, while the Prairies and Ontario are spending less, or about the same.
“What we’re seeing now is a levelling off of health spending — pretty much flat growth in Manitoba,” said Kuchciak.
“Keep in mind, the previous two years, we saw significant rates of growth in spending driven by the COVID pandemic. What we’re not seeing, however, is that levels of spending are not going back down, or returning to those pre-pandemic levels.”
The entire country is seeing a slowdown in COVID-19-related spending, according to the report — making up 4.4 per cent of the total this year, compared with 9.9 in 2021.