As a Canadian living in America, most every week an American will say something like this to me: “Oh you’re so lucky to be Canadian and have free healthcare.”
Are such statements accurate? The evidence suggests otherwise.
As a Canadian living in America, most every week an American will say something like this to me: “Oh you’re so lucky to be Canadian and have free healthcare.”
Are such statements accurate? The evidence suggests otherwise.
My doctor quit after his elderly patients started dying off and he questioned the vax and got thrown out of his family practice group. He went back to school. I have not had a doctor since. My buddy needs back surgery and he got his referral to the surgeon for his first appointment ten months from now. Then he gets on the surgeon’s wait list. I’ll bet if he asked for MAID they’d give it to him tomorrow. Great having socialized medicine.
Free Healthcare..So free it consumes 50% of Provincial Budgets and the waiting lists and lines grow each year.
My father’s response to his friends in the US was, “If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.”
I recall reading an article a while back (before COVID) that one of the biggest single causes of personal bankruptcy in the USA is due to medical costs. If true, that says something is good about our system, flawed as it is.
That was true once upon a time, before it was taken over by ‘health care professionals’ instead of medical practitioners. My sister-in-law works for one of the LIHN’s that McGuinty created to ease hospital waiting times in Ontario 15 years ago. She’s a great person and a dedicated and conscientious employee who has worked her way up to a team leader position through hard work. My whole problem is that when I asked her what her job is she gave me a ten minute bowl of word salad, so I asked her to simplify for me and just describe what she does on an average day. It amounted to reading reports from other teams then spreading them out among her team so that they can create their own reports about the first reports then spread them around to the other teams so that they can do the same thing. In other words a circle jerk. She also claims that they are chronically understaffed no matter how many they hire. The bureaucracy has taken on a life of its own and it’s insatiable, it will consume every available taxpayer dollar, sick people be damned.
Bureaucracy has greatly increased since Turdoo took over. It’s one way to show that the job numbers are up.
You may be bankrupt…..but you’re alive.
Our system is and has been severely broken for decades…..if I can get an MIR for my dog tomorrow but for my wife…..8 months….somethings wrong.
It’s well past the time to allow more privatization.
I can buy an expensive car….or a cheap one, but I can’t pay more of my hard earned money for better healthcare?
Canadian Healthcare the great equalizer.
C’mon guys, what’s more important, people who might die at ERs without being seen, or posturing about combatting imaginary climate change – I think we’ll all agree on the latter!
How ironic … Obamakkare was SOLD on the notion that our Emergency Rooms were overcrowded with people who DIDN’T have healthcare. I look forward to our Emergency Rooms becoming overcrowded too.
BTW … we have a “Cadillac” health plan from my wife’s school district … and I just had to take her to the Emergency Room … twice … because she had a brain bleed which caused a localized seizure in her arm and hand … and we were seen IMMEDIATELY. She’s all better now … except the medication makes her REALLY tired. But so far, so good with the Obamakkare shitshow … thankfully … we’re not really in it.
Sorry to hear about your wife, Kenji, hope everything works out okay.
Thank you … so far … she appears to have recovered. But this is the kind of thing that can flare up without warning.
Healthcare in AB, which should be excellent, is substandard and I don’t even know who to blame now.
My friend in PEI hurt his back, didn’t even go to the hospital, but enquired about going to the US as he knew the wait at the hospital would be insane.
In a decade, when the baby boomers are well into their 70’s, hospitals in Canada will be lined up out the door and there won’t be anyone to blame but gov’t which controls it all, and unions which is the first tier of idiocy above the common workers.
My cousin lives in the USA, his healthcare practitioners are great, if he needs to see one, the appointments are within days, if he needs surgery, it can be and has been scheduled within weeks. The key to healthcare in the USA is to have insurance for it, which can be costly, but about the same as paying taxes here in Canada, but with much better results. Many Canadian healthcare practitioners are now working in the USA, for obvious reasons.
The old adage “Canada has the best free healthcare in the world, if you can survive the wait times”, may no longer be applicable. I’ve noticed a distinct decline in the amount and quality of said healthcare, especially post covid. Very difficult to find a doctor that is accepting new patients, even harder to find one that speaks english. They do know about 3rd world diseases, which may be good for the “new Canadians” making their way here, not so much for us old stock Canadians, unless we catch said maladies.. My parents doctor moved out to the BC coast and left them in the lurch, which was better, as that doctor was completely awful. No care was better than her care!
ER’s are full of non English speaking new arrival patients, using the ER as a family doctor, as none are available.
All of my relatives in the Health Care industry have since retired. Conversations with them state it was getting bad before covid, so they pulled out.
I think if i come down with something bad enough, I’ll simply get my affairs in order, go somewhere nice, enjoy a drink and a smoke and simply pass away, no GD government involvement, there wont be anything usable left, if they ever find me. Critters gotta eat too!
Per person spending on health care:
– in Canada?
– in the US?
I’m sure some Canadians are getting good health care, despite the system. But for the money it’s costing all of us, I don’t think I can be convinced what we are getting collectively is good value.
We don’t even have walk in clinics in Victoria anymore and most have no family doctor. In other words what healthcare? Doesn’t exist at all except for free dope for addicts, nut chopping, abortions and maid
Black Knight: ‘Tis only a flesh wound.
E.R. Doc: We’ll get around to sewing that arm back on… well, I can’t promise anything, but can you come back next Friday?
————————
But it will be FREE!
*taxpayer funded
Remember, not everyone receiving healthcare in Canada is a taxpayer.
Veterans waiting six months was an Obama administration scandal. In the Lieberal Democratic Peoples Republic of Kanada, it’s called queue jumping.
No. No we’re not.
Love seeing a clip of that Female Stun Gun recipient Sandy Rinaldo Snipes.
This from the CBC…spit. A pilot program in Ottawa to have taxis take some patients to the hospital. Sweet… I wonder what’s causing so many problems???
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/paramedics-taxis-ottawa-pierre-poirier-1.7001909
Taxis are good. Trucks could carry more people though….
So, even according to the newscaster, at least 1 in 17 visits to the hospital ER are unnecessary.
A doctor friend in the US once told me:
The difference between the Canadian and the US systems is simple…..a Canadian hospital receives block grants of cash from the government, whereas an American hospital gets paid by insurance companies.
When you go into a Canadian hospital, you are effectively taking money away from it.
When you go into an American hospital with your insurance card you are bringing cash in.
Oh ya….my Dr. friend is Canadian.
I wonder why so many Canadian politicians have gone to the U.S. for medical care over the decades?
We don’t have a health care system. We have an illness treatment system. Very different if you wanted to have a health care system you would start by banning half the food we eat including the fast food restaurants. Then council people to lose weight. Then exercise. The result would be a healthier population. But instead we pill people to death.
Living in the US, I often get to explain how Canada’s healthcare is neither free nor all that great. As in a simple thing like the difference between Wisconsin’s 5.5% (limited) sales tax and Ontario’s 13% blanket sales tax. Some states have no sales tax. How a 1.75 liter bottle of Wiser’s Deluxe Canadian whisky costs $22.00 at Woodman’s and $65.00 in a LCBO. How patients are lying and dying in hallways in Thunder Bay’s Regional Hospital while I got to watch the Olympic gold medal hockey game in a private room while waiting my wife getting an x-ray at Waupaca’s Riverside Hospital. I could go on and on. Canadians are so brainwashed.
Be careful how you cherry pick data. A good friend of mine moved to a small town in upstate New York two years ago. He has a very nice house that cost $250,000. His property taxes are close to $13,000 per year and this is not an outlier. Apparently similar rates apply in Vermont and New Hampshire. He only made the move because N.Y. state apparently doesn’t tax his military pension which offsets some of the property tax grab.
25 years ago while attending a conference in Pittsburgh, I was talking to another real estate broker and the subject of health care in Canada came up. I asked him what he paid for insurance – $750 per month (in 1997 dollars). In a similar vein, seven years ago while at an RV park outside San Diego, I got into a conversation with a park volunteer, he was paying $1,000 per month for family coverage.
A neighbour of ours two years ago was taken to a hospital in Florida and it cost him about $17,000 for a one or two night stay (travel insurance covered it). That is a hospital, there are specialty clinics for everything in Florida. Four years ago I had what I thought was a torn calf muscle from a severe cramp. I discussed this with a pharmacist at Walgreen’s who cautioned me these were the same symptoms of a blood clot which can be life threatening. He told me to not go to a hospital as they are expensive, to see him in a couple of days and, if the symptoms persisted, he would recommend a local clinic. This happened and I got an appointment that afternoon. The doctor thought it was a torn muscle but recommended tests to confirm. After getting approval from our insurance company, later that afternoon I had an ultrasound done (termed a doppler), MRI the next morning preceded by blood tests. The total costs were about $725 Cdn. and all done in less that 24 hours. Seven years ago, my wife had to wait six weeks for an MRI in the Toronto area and relatively simple back surgery had a seven month wait (with severe pain).
There you have it. There are many ways to make the Canadian system more efficient but entrenched interests always prevent it. The previous Conservative government was about to implement private diagnostic clinics for procedures like MRI’s but the McGuinty Liberal government overturned it. There is one private clinic in Ontario, The Shouldice Hospital in Richmond Hill north of Toronto. They specialize in a certain type of hernia operation and only cherry pick the cases they accept (my neighbour last year had to lose 8 lbs. before his operation else it would be cancelled). My brother in law went there and did some checking, the Slouldice can do the operation for something like 1/3 of what a full service hospital charges OHIP. Note that Sen. Rand Paul traveled to the Shouldice four years ago. When you mention things like this here in Ontario, the usual suspects stick their fingers in their ears and chant lalalala, we don’t hear you.
US healthcare is infinitely better than the socialist, public-sector union run Soviet-style system we have in Canuckistan.
I’m guessing that with the push for socialist healthcare in the US, Americans started getting flooded with the easily-disprovable propaganda that Canadian healthcare was so much better.
And free…
So they mostly believe their programming. And as usual it is the fools (aka “the left”) who swallow this the most. The same types who believe the lies of Cuban healthcare being some sort of utopia, despite reality.
Like any bureaucracy that is insulated from realities, they grow. As they grow, their perspective naturally shifts towards their own needs and soon the needs of those they serve is soon forgotten.
The taxpayer is forced to pay someone who has no accountability. What could possibly go wrong?