One of the headlines today says that Ontario Premier Ford, Health Minister set to make joint announcement. My immediate reaction was whether it was about hips or knees.
While it isn't directly about hips and knees, it is about private clinics being publicly funded for surgeries. The first stage is cataract surgeries, followed by knee and hip replacements. So I guessed right.
There are 130,000 hip and knee replacements in Canada a year. Ontario has 24,105 knee replacements and 22,727 hip replacements.
One article gave this indication of cost: Generally, patients who have hip and joint replacements stay in the hospital for 4.5 days. This amounts to nearly $10,000 per person in inpatient costs, not including physician payments and rehabilitation, and totaling over $1.2 billion year-over-year.
Another gave this: "Antoniou and colleagues compared the hospital cost of hip-replacement surgery done in Canada with those in the USA (three hospitals). In Canada, the average total cost for the procedure was $6,766; this included both direct and overhead costs [20]. The total cost in the USA was over $13,000."
The $6,800 figure is what is reported most often.
Here's a close-up of part of the Bird of Paradise flower.
