By OLIVER MOORE

Globe and Mail Update

Thursday, January 24 – Online Edition, Posted at 4:35 PM EST

The number of Canadians who feel that the health-care system is not meeting their needs jumped 50 per cent in only four years, data released Thursday by Statistics Canada indicate.

Although Canadians remain overwhelmingly content with the health care system, a dramatically growing number told a national survey that they had found it lacking in "acceptability," "availability" or "accessibility" during the previous 12 months.

The data suggests that as many as 1.5 million Canadians believe that Canada's medicare system is failing them. That number, based on the biennial National Population Health Survey, represents a steady rise to 6.6 per cent in 1998/99 from 4.4 per cent of citizens in 1994/95.

More than half of respondents said that pressures on their time or negative perceptions of health care or doctors had stopped them from getting treatment. Almost 40 per cent blamed availability issues, such as long waiting times for treatment. And nearly 13 per cent cited a financial or physical inability to obtain treatment. (Roughly 5 per cent of the 14,143 respondents cited more than one reason.)

Almost 800,000 adults, 3.5 per cent of the total population, reported that a perceived lack of "acceptability" was at least one of the reasons they had not sought the attention they felt they needed. These respondents were generally indifferent to or actively distrustful of the health-care system. They reported deciding not to bother with treatment as they considered it probably would be inadequate, and that doctors were to be feared or unworthy of trust.

Household income was not seen to affect people's perception of the availability of care, but it vastly affected how they viewed the accessibility of treatment. Members of low-income households were more than six times as likely as those in upper-middle or high income households to cite the inability to get to a treatment centre as the reason they refrained from getting the care they believed they needed.