It's disappointing that you can't buy some top-up insurance that lets you avoid excessive wait time, but the wait times don't seem crazy[0], especially if they'

It's disappointing that you can't buy some top-up insurance that lets you avoid excessive wait time, but the wait times don't seem crazy[0], especially if they're triaging people to do the most urgent cases first. Though supposedly these stats don't capture the full picture and wait times are longer for some patients [1]. The only real explanations I could come up with off the top of my head for why wait times should even exist are that hip replacements are highly seasonal, turns out there was a study done on this a decade ago [2], and a little surprisingly there is a pretty large seasonality in service delivery; i.e. doctors take holidays/people don't want to have surgery during the holidays and the people needing surgery back up. Though it didn't talk about whether demand is also seasonal and how that affects things. But since the wait times are still long it seems like nothing has really been done to address this. Still, this seems like a solvable problem. In fact it looks like the national statistics are obscuring the fact that wait times are highly variable with some provinces doing significantly better [3] [0] http://waittimes.cihi.ca/All http://waittimes.cihi.ca/All [1] http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/new-report-shows-most-canadian-patients-are-getting-surgeries-on-time-once-they-can-get-their-names-on-a-waiting-list http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/new-report-shows-... [2] http://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6963-6-22 http://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1... [3] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/rob-brown/wait-times-hip-surgery_b_8044828.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/rob-brown/wait-times-hip-surger...