--- title: "A $25,000 hip and the growing traffic to Canada’s private clinics" description: "A Prince Edward Island couple borrowed the money rather than wait two more years for surgery on the public system" author: "Albion Grey" published: 2026-09-26T09:00:00Z modified: 2026-09-27T03:10:21Z url: https://rews.cc/a/a-25-000-hip-and-the-growing-traffic-to-canada-s-private-cli-083485 language: en tags: ["health", "infrastructure", "canada", "bureaucracy", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # A $25,000 hip and the growing traffic to Canada’s private clinics *A Prince Edward Island couple borrowed the money rather than wait two more years for surgery on the public system* By Albion Grey · September 26, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-25-000-hip-and-the-growing-traffic-to-canada-s-private-cli-083485 ## In brief - Neil and Janet Payne of Kinkora, P.E.I., borrowed $25,000 for a private hip replacement in Montreal rather than wait 12-15 more months - Health P.E.I. says the median hip-replacement wait was 282 days in Q1 2026-27; the 90th percentile improved from 519 to 476 days - 33.7% of completed island hip cases met the national 182-day benchmark, up from 28.4% a year earlier - SecondStreet.org polling found about 9% of lower-income and 11% of higher-income Canadians had paid out of province or country for care - Colin Craig advocates public funding that follows the patient to any qualified provider, citing European models Neil and Janet Payne call it “Le Hip Trip.” Faced this summer with the news that Neil would probably wait another 12 to 15 months for a hip replacement—on top of the nine months he had already endured—the couple from Kinkora, Prince Edward Island, borrowed C$25,000 on a line of credit and drove to a private clinic in Montreal. Within about 48 hours of deciding, the logistics were arranged; the clinic co-ordinated the X-rays, blood work and other pre-operative tests on the island, according to an account the couple gave to the CBC’s *This is P.E.I.* podcast. Mr Payne paid overnight in the clinic—an extra $1,500 for the privilege—and was well enough to travel home the next day. “The care in the clinic was unreal,” he said. “You get your own nurse while you’re there and everything.” Mr Payne’s right hip had been worn down by osteoarthritis; a hike on Cape Breton’s Seawall Trail made the pain much worse. He stopped working last November, when X-rays came back and the doctor, as Mr Payne recalls, said the hip was totally gone. Over the wait he lost perhaps 25 to 35 pounds—from the hike, but also from the medication—and, his wife said, “he just turned into an old man that just couldn’t do anything anymore.” The couple did not have the money to hand. “After all those years and kids, we didn’t have $25,000 just sitting around in the bank waiting for a hip,” Ms Payne said. The line of credit will delay her retirement. “Maybe that means I’ll just work until I die.” She calls the trade-off worth it: “I would rather make that choice and have some quality of life for Neil and myself and our family than to just accept the fact that we had to wait 15 more months and that he might not have been able to make it.” Today Mr Payne is back hiking and keeping up with his children and grandchildren. Had he stayed on the list, he notes, “my next summer could have been screwed too.” ## The queue, by the numbers The province is not unsympathetic. Health P.E.I., the island’s health authority, told CBC News it cannot discuss individual patients, but said hip-replacement waits are improving in some respects. The median wait was 282 days in the first quarter of the 2026-27 fiscal year, actually up slightly from 276 days a year earlier. But the 90th-percentile wait—the tail of patients kept waiting longest—fell from 519 days to 476. Eighty-nine hip replacements were completed in the quarter, up from 81, and 33.7% of completed cases met the national 182-day benchmark, up from 28.4%. “While wait times remain longer than the \[Canadian Institute for Health Information\] standards, recent operational changes are helping us increase surgical volumes and improve access for Islanders,” the authority said. Progress, then, but of a modest kind: even at the improved 90th percentile, an islander at the back of the queue waits more than 15 months for an operation the national standard says should take six. It is precisely that gap that turns patients into medical tourists within their own country. ## Follow the money, follow the patient Colin Craig, president of SecondStreet.org, a think-tank based in Regina that campaigns on health reform, argues the assumption that only the rich jump the queue is wrong. Polling by his organisation found that about 9% of Canadians earning less than $60,000 a year had travelled to another province or country and paid for treatment because of long waits at home; among those earning over $100,000 the figure was about 11%. “There’s not a big gap between the lower income people and higher income people. It’s people of all incomes now that are doing this,” Mr Craig said. The underlying fault, in his telling, is a system little changed in decades: “We as taxpayers pay so much money into the government each year in the name of health insurance, and they’re not living up to their end of the bargain.” His prescription is to let public money follow the patient rather than the institution, on the model of some European systems that guarantee treatment within set timelines and will pay when patients must go elsewhere, including to private clinics. “We fund health-care systems, so a lot of our money gets wasted on bureaucracy,” Mr Craig said. “It shouldn’t matter if it’s a non-profit clinic or a for-profit or if it’s a government provider. If the patient chooses to get their surgery there, the money should follow the patient.” Competition, he argues, would make providers treat patients “like customers” and improve service. That argument is gaining ground across Canada, and not only among free-marketeers: P.E.I. itself has partnered with a private clinic to cut MRI waits, though its premier has denounced a for-profit firm offering tourists faster access to island care. Yet the objections are as sturdy as the frustrations. A system in which funding follows the patient risks pulling staff and volume out of public hospitals that must keep doors open anyway, and a two-tier logic sits uneasily with the founding promise of medicare. The Paynes, tellingly, both used the private escape hatch and remain believers in the public system. “But is there a way to make it more efficient? Can we do more with what we have?” Ms Payne asked. “Because what’s going on right now is just not acceptable. People are really suffering and dying.” The island’s authorities point to rising surgical volumes as evidence of repair. For now, though, the calibre of that repair is best measured in the Paynes’ ledger: one working hip, one depleted line of credit, and a retirement postponed by a queue that still moves too slowly.