Last week in budget estimates, I asked the Health Minister about the ratio between front line healthcare workers and administrative staff.

I’ve heard from constituents and healthcare workers that health administrations continue to grow, but access to care hasn’t improved.

Minister Dix told me that B.C. has “one of the lowest administrative costs in the country,” but that didn’t line up with what we’ve heard from healthcare professionals. So we checked his numbers with data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).

Turns out, the numbers don’t match. B.C. has some of the HIGHEST percentages of healthcare spending on administrative costs across all of the provinces (excluding the territories) – not the lowest.

According to CIHI’s 2023 “Series D3” data table, B.C. is tied with Saskatchewan for the second-highest portion of public healthcare spending going to administrative costs of all the provinces, at 2%. The average across the provinces is 1.87%.

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