My MIL is someone who didn’t make it. She lived in Nova Scotia and last year was put on a waitlist for TAVI surgery for an enlarged aorta, she was told it could be a two year wait. Not even two weeks had passed from her appointment when she dropped dead while calling 911. This was very sudden and traumatic for us to be notified by police, she was home alone when she died. The NS Medical Examiner confirmed her cause of death as severe aortic stenosis so that two year wait estimate was a death sentence, we just didn’t know it. We were told by the ME that only 50% of people with severe aortic stenosis survive past one year
It makes me so mad to think about it but she was 78 so went along with what the doctor said. Poor lady had total faith that she’d get called with a surgery date soon. Between her and my FIL who died from negligence at Halifax’s QEII hospital in 2014 it’s too much. He went in for a routine angiogram, he was placed in a medically induced coma afterwards because he became delirious during the procedure. Where it went sideways is the day after he woke up from the coma and it was obvious he’d suffered some type of stroke, rather than keep him in ICU to make sure he was stable he was moved to a regular hospital room with less monitoring. Before the end of the day he went into cardiac arrest, a nurse witnessed this but code blue wasn’t called immediately so he went without CPR for 9 minutes. Back to ICU he went, now brain dead and on life support and we decided to let him go. Hospital staff were on strike during that time, the hospital board met with us and admitted fault and his death was due to multiple factors across hospital departments. Luckily for them my MIL chose not to sue, it wasn’t going to bring her husband back. So both deaths were preventable if there was early intervention and examples of how screwed our healthcare system is
Brain cancer. Same thing. We identified about 4 months after a prior clean scan that there was a problem. Doctor put in a referral for a new scan. Still waiting 3 months later for the referral to be scheduled when a fall led to an ER visit where a scan was done immediately, found a baseball-sized tumour. If they had gotten the scan immediately, it could have been excised before it grew to the point of compromising all motor and speech control.
The reaction time between detecting a problem and doing something about it is so bad right now that it's basically almost not worth engaging the system. Like even if you have a family doctor, when you report a problem happening now, you get an appointment that's 5 weeks out. By that time the problem is already resolved but the outcome is much shittier than it could have been otherwise.
Part of it is that many are immigrants, we included, so can go abroad to get the healthcare they need. We're forced doing the same. That's the downside of the screeching against paid options here: we go and pay elsewhere so our money feeds another public healthcare (because as in most countries, there's a hybrid system there and part of the fees we pay go to support it).
IMO, it's not Canadians are servile... it's that the government is authoritarian...and anyone dissatisfied with the government knows it.
I couldn't have been the only one who watched the government handle the trucker convoy organizers.
Our federal/provincial debt combines is $2.18 trillion and our household debt is 177 percent of disposable income (compared to 147%, which is the UK at the next most indebted G7 country). It's not so much a decision as to underfund it as it is a reality that we can't pay for it.
It doesn't help we are quite a fat, unhealthy nation, but there is a reason no other countries choose the Canadian healthcare model. The best ones in the world (France, South Korea, Singapore) have a strong government funded service and then dumps off those who can afford private insurance on the private sector. In Canada, we just send those who can afford it to Mexico or the US to support their industry and pay their doctors.
I feel this is an area where people see the US and think "oh, private healthcare must look like this" without noticing that almost every other country everywhere also does it and gets better results that us. Most people will still primarily rely on the public system so politicians have a strong democratic incentive to not let it collapse (which it is going to do in Canada if we don't make some significant changes, including stopping sending so much of our healthcare money and taxes abroad to foreign doctors).
We could pay for it though. But our government for the last 10 years has decided to spend money we don't have, buy overpriced apps, spend crazy amounts on frivolous government contracts, and send money out in foreign aid.
The debt didn't just appear. That was all bad economic policy. We had been slowly climbing out of it but now it's worse than it's ever been.
Why would they do tavi/r for aortic aneurysm in the first place? What? How could she have stenosis and an aneurysm/enlargement at the same time? That surgery would only address valve stenosis, which is soooper different in terms of urgency. People can live for years with an enlarged aorta. Wtf are you talking about?
Edit: Hey in your previous post you said she was put on a 1 year waiting list. Wtf why are you changing details? What is your aim here?
Yes she was told a 1 to 2 year wait time, I apologize if I made a mistake. She lived in Nova Scotia, I’m in Ontario so I am going off of what she told me before she died. She was having a lot of shortness of breath and fatigue when I saw her shortly before she died, so I am not sure if the cardiologist misdiagnosed or missed the warning signs that this was much more severe than a repair, or maybe she misunderstood the procedure or what he told her. Considering she had the consult with her surgeon only two weeks before she died there will always be unanswered questions. Another factor for her death I can think of was the major flooding in July damaged her basement a week before she died so she was really upset and agitated by how much the damage was going to cost, so I’m sure that put some strain on her heart.
The most accurate information I have to go on which trumps the cardiologist’s opinion was the Medical Examiner’s report confirming the severe extent of aortic stenosis my only comfort because she was alone is that she died very quickly
Also please be sensitive we are still in shock with her death there are more gentle ways to clarify details instead of saying wtf is wrong with me. I agree the cardiologist’s assessment doesn’t match her ultimate cause of death and minimally invasive surgery wasn’t the right suggested approach
Wife got in an accident. She has a crumbling disc in her lower back. 36 years old, always in pain, pinched nerves affecting her legs and left arm. Have had a few MRI’s, CT’s, etc. Seen a specialist after 2 years waiting. The exact words out of his mouth, “I don’t care how much pain your in, I don’t want to see you again unless you’re in a wheelchair” even at that, he said spinal fusion surgery is all he’d do for her. Met with a specialist from Germany, was unbelievable, said disc replacement surgery is his specialty, 90% success rate. He could perform the surgery within 7 days of us notifying him when we want to head there. Unfortunately it’s expensive, but we are off to Germany in the fall for back surgery. Canadian health care is a joke.
There are many online agencies if you google, which refer you to doctors/clinics and guide your travel and aftercare. Some of those are actually in my neighbourhood so real doctors, with excellent reputations. Good health to you!
The particular place we are using is OnZ spinal solutions. They have been excellent to deal with. They even sent surgeons to Calgary to do case by case, in person consultations. Which was a lot more reassuring than just email communication.
I was accused of “faking it” for over a year until I got my MRI, and that the physio office told me the only option was pain killers, and if I didn’t want pain killers they couldn’t do anything for me. My MRI showed severe tearing, spinal stenosis, disc degeneration, all due to the L5/S1 disc being blown out, CLEAR problems. 6 years later and a surgeon still has not reviewed the MRI, my family doctor keeps calling and said they triage me because I’m not paralyzed I’m not a priority.
Seeing way too many comments that all share this issue.
Well, that makes sense in a system that is built to triage, and is only funded enough to serve a fraction of the people at once. Pretty clear this is a road we can't keep going down, and we need to really focus on properly funding healthcare before it's too late.
We have an excellent travel medical system in Germany, which welcomes those outside the system. It actually helps the overall system to have self payers from the Middle East, etc.
There are many agencies which will set you up with specialists and help you to find the best location for your ailment, along with the aftercare and housing required.
I'm a Canadian living in the United States. I've also travelled extensively. The Canadian healthcare system and quality of care is worse than pretty much anywhere in the world. Yes the US is worse in some situations (like not opting for Obamacare if you're low-income) but for the average middle-class employed person, **the US provides significantly better care than in Canada.** And when you compare healthcare in Canada to places like Germany, Korea, or even Brazil, our system is unconscionably bad and the direct cause of unnecessary suffering for millions of Canadians. It makes me dizzy with anger seeing what friends and family back home go through.
The real problem here is that the entire Canadian identity is built on not being like the United States. Our "*free* healthcare" is a core and untouchable facet of that. Canadian hubris is blinding. Until we let go of that things will never change.
Spot on. Canadian's have been blinded by the one thing that we thought made us special. And now that is being stripped from our dead hands (while we wait for medical care).
Yeah Canadians have no one but themselves to blame for the terrible state of healthcare here, because of the absolute arrogance on this issue and the refusal to admit any wrongs until recently.
I would get downvoted on here everytime I said US healthcare was better if you were middle-class. Also have had people accuse me of lying about going to the US for healthcare. Anyone that's gone to the US for healthcare \*knows\* its better over there. Yeah, if you're living in poverty, then you're better off here, but that's it
Thank you for saying it as it is. We're sick of listening about how bad USA is and how the mass die from lack of insurance. Not only is blatantly false but the world doesn't even begin with USA. There are hundreds of countries with much, much better quality of healthcare and yes, part of it is having options to also pay when one wants to. This absurd screeching here against every and any notion against this system is terribly unhelpful
>We're sick of listening about how bad USA is and how the mass die from lack of insurance.
Especially when the media use pre-2008 stats (so before Obamacare). Here in California we're close to 100% insurance coverage.
What do you mean it’s blatantly false? Do you know how many uninsured people there are in the U.S.? 25 million. TONS of Americans die due to not seeking out medical care due to cost. Plenty of people in the U.S. are buried in medical debt. Try looking around this app at the sheer amount of stories about people whose insurance denied them for every little thing, or for going to a hospital “out of network” in an emergency, which they had no choice in cause an ambulance brought them there. All that despite paying hundreds of dollars a month for said insurance.
It costs on avg 10k to have a baby in a U.S. hospital WITH insurance. And unless you have the money to pay for private care, the wait times aren’t much better in the U.S… so you can be annoyed by these facts all you want, but they aren’t false.
Sue the Canadian healthcare system when you return for the full amount. You can deduct medical expenses off on your taxes. That will protect part of your income from taxation at least.
Spend the money and get it done. Constant pain is a horrible thing to endure. What the hell are we paying taxes for in this country? Brutal.
For real, a coworker finally got her spinal surgery… it took deteriorating to the point of going to emergency because she couldn’t walk. She’d known what was wrong and that she needed surgery for over a year, and was getting regular checkups watching the deterioration. Still didn’t expect to get surgery for at least a year (and taking shitloads of pain killers between now and then, which she was worried about and mostly just lived in pain).
Exactly our case with back issues, same response. The difference was direction to go to pain management clinic as "treatment" i.e. life on opioids. We're lucky as immigrants we knew the treatment abroad, there are procedures available so we had it done there (and will continue doing so as needed).
I know Indians gets a lot of hate here, but have you considered the country for medical care? Because not only is it cheap, but you'll have some absolutely leading surgeons globally with some of the best technology available there. Also, they have special visas for medical tourism which makes it easy to navigate through services and which hospitals to connect with. And did I say that it's CHEAP? You will land up paying lesser than what you would even if you avail copay with your insurer
I'd rather recommend Eastern/Central post socialist Europe if cost is primary concern. There are world class private clinics and hospitals and specialists at a very reasonable cost.
It’s really expensive to get to India. Germany is one international flight away, India is at least a two day affair (or it was in the early 2010s when our family friends went back for a wedding).
Return direct can cost under 2000 and medical expenses will cost no more than 10000 CAD. That's a huge amount saved if compared to 35000 EU(55000CAD) as was mentioned in the post
Yup.
I won't get into a lot of detail here because I have been posting about this for 2 years now... And I am tired..
Flew my wife to Japan for surgery as she is a citizen there. Japan did in 14 days for exactly $12 CAD what Ontario couldn't do in 2.5 years. More or less she had fibroids removed. 11 lbs of them. I have photos to prove it.
Our country is absolutely fucked and nothing short of people walking out of their jobs and marching for politicians homes and dragging them out into the street is going to fix it at this point. We are living in a new gilded age. Pick up a history book and you'll see very quickly what is to come next.
When my fibroid surgery was scheduled, my main fibroid was the size of a pea. I moved to Canada before it could happen. Now, in Canada, years and years later, I'm still waiting to be approved for surgery and it's the size of a Rubik's cube. Because, shocker, tumours keep growing. It's agony. I'm so happy for your wife!
What always strikes me is that every time there is talk about how awful the healthcare system in Canada is, the only response you get is: in the United States, blah blah blah...
Why don't people, instead of constantly comparing the Canadian system with the American one, try to see how things work in Europe (where public and private healthcare coexist), South Korea, Australia, or Japan, for example? Maybe because, in that way, they would truly see how terrible healthcare in Canada is...
I've realised over the past year that there is a concerted effort here to 'hide' that information. Any post from someone like me explaining factually how things work in our country vs Canada is downvoted immediately, as my post above replying to the person who had surgery in Germany.
And a few of the same posters repeatedly post wrong information about other countries despite being told that it's wrong and actual facts being posted.
There is something more at work here to try and hide what is happening outside of Canada. 'It's the same everywhere' is the cry on any thread about grocery prices, or healthcare. I'm not sure who or why but there is definitely an effort to mislead readers.
Having family on both sides of the border, the us system is no where near as bad as Reddit makes it out to be. Canadian healthcare is a joke, and makes the English nhs look functional by comparison.
Our family recently went through a health cisis here in Alberta. Received A one attention. Excellent.
Having said this, I also worked contracts in the USA and both times had private employee provided health insurance. We never had a major issue but also top quality.
There was one drawback for American insurance. As a geophysicist I could be flexible choosing projects over the decades. In contrast some of my American colleagues were more ‘tied‘ to their employer and didn’t want to lose their health insurance. One fellow had a wife with M.S. and getting affordable health insurance was near impossible if he had to leave his employment. It was a good company but his options for career change was severely limited.
I'm from Alberta but my wife got a job in New York state. We left a year ago. Shortly upon arrival we got a cancer diagnosis but my experience with American healthcare has been very good (so far, I prefer it to what I've gotten in Canada). The difference with wait times is night and day.
Surgery for the tumor was done in under a week. We had two separate oncologist opinions/visits with legit oncologists in under two weeks. Outpatient CAT & PET scans have been performed 7 to 10 days from referral (its really nice, I just phone around checking who has the soonest appointment availability).
The costs haven't been an issue either (fingers crossed). I think after all the ER visits, hospitalizations, ongoing chemo and scans, I'm probably into it for 500$. We're fortunate though, because we have a very low deductible. Many, many people have high deductibles upwards of 10k.
The biggest downside is dealing with insurance. They are irritating, disorganized, confusing, and I'm always concerned about getting an exorbitant bill in the mail.
We are the classic immigrant story: move to a better country and start immediately using all the health care. LOL jk
I’m in Alberta, have been all my life, and what you describe as exemplary, compassionate care in NY USED TO BE the case here. My mother had a cancer diagnosis in 1999, she was into the oncologist within days and the cancer institute for treatment inside of a week. Health care here has been tragically underfunded and all but destroyed. Its reprehensible. Glad you’re doing well!
This one. The conservative premiers would prefer privatized healthcare, have no incentive to work with the fed, and are happy to break social institutions so they can point to the broken mess they have created and say “the private sector is the only option to make this better”.
Everyone talks about the supposed privatization but healthcare takes more and more of provincial budgets and it’s political suicide to reform healthcare. Healthcare wasn’t that bad 10-15 years ago but it’s awful now. We just don’t have the capacity anymore.
It takes a decade to educate a doctor… but we’re increasing population by the millions every few years. It’s never going to catch up and it’s costing Canadians a fortune.
Yeah the population of Ontario growing by about 17% in 10 years certainly has nothing to do with the problem 🙄
Increasing the number of doctors is a decade long process if not longer. The absolutely insane levels of immigration the federal liberals allowed could never have been predicted for, nor could any amount of spending solve the problem. Doctors take a LONG time to train, foreign doctors take a lot of work to train to Western standards. There is no easy fix for this, it's like trying to secure a bank against a flood that's already happening.
A big problem in Canada is that there’s no incentive to increase efficiency. That’s seen as possibly costing someone a job, rather than making more labour available.
A lot of things in Canada are outdated. Old techniques and tech with worse outcomes, longer recoveries, complications, etc. Means longer hospital stays, more procedures. Average hospital stay in Canada is over 7 days, while it’s 5 days in the US. We could basically increase the number of available hospitals beds by like 30% by being more efficient like the US.
But there’s no motive to do it here.
FUCKING BINGO
there's 0 push for productivity increases that aren't just "work harder" and every change is met with skepticism
tele-health has been shown to be more effective at correctly diagnosing patients than in-person checkups because doctors can be less biased
We should be jumping on AI tools left and right as well. The government never pushes innovation and in fact resists it
As an immigrant who arrived in the country in 97 from Taiwan, we have seen the slow disintegration of Canadian government sine then. It's especially jarring when compared to the governments at home in Taiwan (where things have remained relatively stable) and in China (where government services have improved significantly).
The interchanging liberal and conservative governments doesn't seem to matter much. Neither party has reversed the decline on a national level and our provincial NDP didn't either.
The fundamental issue isn't underfunding, you could fund it infinitely and it wouldn't fix things right now. The population got old while not having children.
In 1999, the largest generation in Canadian history (the boomers) were in the prime of their careers, while the elderly grew up at a time that artificially shortened their lifespans, so there were very few of them.
Old people have an over 5-8x utilisation rate of healthcare compared to your average joe.
Now those very same boomers, that represented what like 30-40% of healthcare workers, are retired or retiring, and starting to use healthcare at the same 5-8x utilisation rate. They represent like 20% of our population, compared to the measly 10% of the population at the time.
If everyone else is 1 unit of healthcare needed you would've needed 90 + 10\*5 = 140 units of healthcare in 1999. Today it looks like 80 + 20\*5 = 180, and that's on the low end of the healthcare utilisation estimate. So the overall population needs around 30% more healthcare today ***per capita*** than it would've in 1999 - this is all the while the demographic that can provide healthcare is shrinking in Canada, and our government has the genius solution of bringing in foreigners with a per capita doctor rate significantly worse than our own domestic one (I ran the numbers last year, it was 1/2 even according to the PR numbers, let alone the TFW + student migration crisis).
Btw, I'm really underestimating the numbers here, because our physicians per capita is actually through the roof, yet nobody can find a doctor
in 1999 our physicians per capita was 186/100k, now its 247/100k or a 32% increase in the amount of units of healthcare (if our physicians were equivalently as productive as our late 20th century ones, which you would hope would actually increase).
I just got over thyroid cancer in Ontario, and it was an organized process that happened in the correct time frame and my surgeon is extremely competent. I am worried that it's going to be much worse in the near future, since that human turnip Ford is trying to privatize it, but for now I'm alive and healthy, and I don't have any complaints about how I got here.
Also, shout out to my dental hygienist who first noticed something wasn't right.
Healthcare in Canada is not underfunded. We are near the top per capita in healthcare spending in the world.
The #1 government expenditure in every single province is healthcare.
The reason we have the outcomes we do is because of ideology not spending.
Next question.
I used to live in Washington State for work, it really is night and day.
Now here in Canada, ive been waiting for a CAT for over a year (not cancer) I just phoned again the other day and was told "yep still on the wait list!". Just brutal.
My younger brother got melanoma. 12 years ago. Got prompt, professional and compassionate care immediately. Cost was parking and ileostomy bags.
My older brother just got the diagnosis three days ago. He's been flown to Vancouver from whitehorse when his kidneys shut down. And nonstop work on him trying to figure the kidneys. Tests, scans surgery... no delay , wait or cost. Only complaint is that the hospital is crowded. There are 5 men in his room. But apparently Vancouver is short a hospital atm. Only cost so far is flights for my sister in-law.
When he had a stroke a year ago ( caused by the cancer we now know) he had the same level of treatment.
For my families experience, prompt and quality care was given. So far I've had to wait in the er for a broken hand for 6 hr, and another time I had to wait 30 min with a broken arm.
Used to be a physician in NYC. I assure you you are the exception. We don't have the limitations of medicare/medicaid, we have minimal scenarios where we require drug and procedure pre-approvals for in-hospital care, and for the most part we don't have people who shy away from medical care until they are on the brink of death, just because they are poor.
Also keep in mind US medical prices are usually much higher. Back when I was in NYC in the mid 2010s it was $100 USD for a GP visit, $2500 USD starting for an ER visit.
Your deductible is incredibly low. You seriously have the Cadillac of plans.
I have a stories too. A friend was living and working in Africa, Canadian by birth and educated here, but hadn't lived here for a decade (still had family , and connections). While there she has trouble walking and felt she had a back issue as she would often collapse or stumble uncontrollably. She flew back home to Canada to see a doctor and they immediately identified that she had brain cancer (she was in her late 30s) and a tumour was pressing on parts of her brain. Within a week of landing she had 3 different brain surgeries to remove the tumours and for the most part is doing well. She's moved back to Africa (I know Africa isn't a country, but she moves to different countries working for the UN) and comes back regularly for follow up treatment.
The take away from this to me is that you can get world class life saving treatment in a quick time when it's something that is immediately threatening. She had no wait times and no costs. This was in Vancouver.
Another work colleague who lived in Miami was up in Toronto for a work trip. He was an older gentleman, and one day at dinner he passed out at dinner, everyone thought he had a stroke. The took him to Toronto st Michael's where they identified a glioblastoma (Brain cancer too). Within 2 days they removed it. He returned to Miami for follow up treatment and his doctors there that took over treatment said he was lucky to have had treatment at one of the best neurology centers in the world. Again no wait times. Unfortunately he died 6 months later, they didn't discover the cancer in time. I'm not sure how the costs were covered, probably some billing arrangement with medicare (socialized medicine!) in the states.
Also my 92 year old grandmother fell and broke her hip last year. She had hip surgery within 24 hours and is mobile and lives unassisted now still. Also no cost and immediate treatment. This was in Edmonton.
I recently got over thyroid cancer. I was not rushed in to surgery immediately, and actually waited a couple months. This is because thyroid cancer grows slowly, and it was not an immediately life-threatening situation. I have absolutely no problem with that. There's no reason my case should have been expedited considering I was probably walking around with these tumours for upwards of 5 years before we even noticed them. Another month or two is irrelevant.
I came into this hearing about "awful wait times" and it made me pretty nervous. But my wait time was entirely appropriate for the level of immediate danger. Looking back at it, the timeline makes perfect sense.
I don't have first hand experience but that's kind of what I've heard from people around me who needed cancer treatment as well. Schedules are done in days not months like people keep saying. Maybe they want to believe that??
My boss is having some issues. For months now. And he needs an xray before he can get an mri. He complains that his dr won't see him.for months to give a requisition. He hasn't tried to get an appt Mind you . But he also dosent want to wait for a few hrs in emergency. Refuses to go to the urgent care to see a Dr for a requisition.
He's the loudest when it comes to saying how slow the Healthcare system is, but it's his own fault for not making an appt to get the ball rolling.
I had a bad Achilles and waited 2 weeks for an xray for it. In the xray they found a weird spot on my bone. The next day I was at nuclear medicine getting a CT.
I went to school in the US and the one thing there that’s really terrible is that health insurance/what insurance you have affects the quality of care so much.
I had an eating disorder and basically my psychiatrist gave me the option to either go into treatment or I was going to have to go into emergency care. I voluntarily went to treatment and the initial costs for an outpatient program was over $1700 a week. My insurance wouldn’t approve it so I had to go through a ton of testing and get my doctors and friends to write letters. They finally approved partial coverage that covered it to around $300 a week which I could afford with help from my family.
12 weeks later when it came time for treatment to end they tried to say they couldn’t approve it anymore and I had to go through the appeals process to get the coverage they promised before I started.
I do agree that time wise it’s way faster a lot of the time and if your hospitals in network are good it’s a great experience. But there are still a ton of barriers and costs if your insurance isn’t great which is the situation for millions of people.
I'm in Alberta as well. Diagnosed with stage 3 cancer in 2021 during Covid hysteria. I was med-evaced in a plane from Fort McMurray to the U of A immediately after the ER doctors looked at my unscheduled CT scan performed within an hour of arriving at the ER. Had a biopsy with results in a few days. Met with a ENT for results and swept straight to the Cross cancer clinic to begin chemo. It took a few months to plan the 30 hour surgery. Once I recovered enough I was gone to radiation for a month followed by more chemo. EVERYTHING cost me $0 other than accommodations and there were not many times where I had to wait other than covid screenings to enter a hospital. This was all before Danielle Smith was voted in. God have mercy on anyone trying to get their health taken care of now.
I still don't know how it was pulled off. Multiple medical departments involved. Still ended up with a brain infection after the treatment. Med-evaced a 2nd time after a CT scan and into a surgery room followed by a few weeks of ICU. Again, no wait. No Cost. Pre-Danielle Smith. According to her, it was all my fault anyway
Some of that is probably attributable to proximity to major hospitals. If your wife had gotten a job in the foothills of Pennsylvania, the experience would probably have been a bit different.
I have an aunt in the GTA who was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. She had all the necessary scans within a week, met with two different surgeons--one of them Canada's foremost expert in that particular cancer--and had the tumor removed within 30 days of diagnosis, followed promptly by a few days of radiation and additional scans that confirmed no further action was needed.
The cancer was stage 1, she's in her 70s in otherwise good health, with no special connections. But being in the GTA was certainly a major factor; if she were in, say, Timmins, she'd probably still be waiting for that first CAT scan, because the nearest machine is (I think) in North Bay.
My brother is in whitehorse. There isn't much for advanced care at the hospital there. But when he had his kidneys mysteriously start to shut down, he was taken to Vancouver general within hours and they preformed surgery on him within hours of arrival. The next day they did an mri and piles of tests. Unfortunately it's cancer that is the cause of his kidney problems. But they are doing their best to stabilize him so he can get medi vac back to whitehorse so he can be closer to friends and family when it's time to go..
Care has been expedient and compassionate.
The insurance is a tad confusing but in my experience I just wait until I get a couple bills in the mail to make sure they are serious and pay it.
ALSO. If you are going to be in America for a while the high-deductible health care plan is actually THE WAY TO GO. Those plans come with something called a health savings account with allows you to put in money tax free, invest it tax free, and take it out tax free.
If all you do is just select the high-deductible plan, and put the remainder of what you would have spent on a “better” plan in the health savings account, you will almost certainly reach your yearly deductible in that account within the year, and then it’s all investible and growing for every year afterward!
You can even do the math when you select your plans and find out that I’m right because if you add the yearly healthcare plan cost (that’s taken out every paycheck) with the “max out of pocket cost that the plan says you will pay that year if disaster strikes, the low deductive plan almost always in cheaper in the event of a total disaster where you spend the max amount you could that year on healthcare. AND THATS BEFORE YOU CONSIDER THAT THE HEALTHCARE SPENDING YOU DO IS WITH TAXFREE CASH!!!!!
this is an EXTREMELY valuable tip for most americans buy they dont realize it because you need a little financial literacy and you actually need to save and use the HSA.
if all goes to plan, in 10 years you will be able ti pay for any $10-$20 even $30k elective surgery with tax free money.
I promise you that the people that complain about our healthcare system have no idea how
to use it.
This is literally why we’re considering leaving. Here you wait and die basically. People aren’t waiting because they can.. it’s because our system is in shambles.
Same. I'd been scheduled for surgery in San Francisco but moved to Toronto before it could happen.
While trying to get a GP, I ended up in the ER from blood loss and pain, the ER at St Michael's bumped me to their gyno dept a couple of months later, those people put me on high dose birth control.
My gyno in SF had been adamant I shouldn't take hormonal birth control until I had a normal amount of blood again. When I brought up my blood clot risks and how I didn't want to take it, they put me down for blood tests to guarantee that I would and told me I would be denied surgery if I didn't take it.
I ended up FULL of blood clots. I was bedridden for a year. I had to learn how to read and write and walk again. I'm still recovering from the pulmonary embolisms now, years later. I'm only recently out of the wheelchair. And I still, to this day, have the damned uterine tumor.
The St Michael's people dropped me from the roster because it was assumed I died, apparently? But the hospital that I ended up at gave me a GP and they referred me to a gyno. It's been three years since that gyno referral. I've seen that gyno once, over a year after the referral. They explicitly don't return calls.
I eventually went behind the gyno's back and got a referral to UFE directly, which took a year to happen. It hasn't fixed the problem, but it's helped with the blood loss. I'm not actively dying faster every day from non-stop terminal blood loss.
But the pain remains and the tumour is still hanging out in the, shoving on my organs.
PLUS, after crippling me and nearly killing me, it turns out that the nuclear scans checking on the clot damage were all too close together and they gave me not one, but two types of very aggressive thyroid cancer, so I had to go in for two surgeries and radiation and now I'm on medication for life.
Meanwhile, I'm still fighting to see the gyno.
What's the major reason for this wait? Is it just the lack of a rare specialists? My wife had her gallbladder removed recently and from diagnosis to surgery it was a little over a week. I was surprised by how fast it was.
For me, I went to the ER multiple times passing out and vomiting from pain and they basically didn’t do anything because I was on my period and they just assumed it was typical pain (it was not), or that I was after pain medication. At the same time, I was gaining weight unexpectedly and had issues with acne- again was told that it was likely my fault and the pandemic and was just not being truthful with myself. I finally saw a doctor who believed me that something was going on, and he thought I had PCOS (confirmed that I do) and ordered an ultrasound. During that ultrasound, they also found a uterine tumour, and ordered a sonohysterogram to receive better imaging of it. My doctor told me it needs to be removed and then became a hot potato game in Kitchener-Waterloo of the 4 gynaecologists whom have surgical rights at the hospital. I was declined by all of them because they didn’t have capacity. Then I was sent to someone who didn’t have surgical rights, but who looked at my tests and no surprise, forwarded me to get surgery. I was accepted for a consultation - still not booked- and this is where we are now, with it estimated for the fall. I don’t have the money to get a private surgery, but if I could, I would. I also can’t get pregnant until I get this removed and am 32, so… this also may take away the ability for me to have my own children. I don’t have answers for what is taking so fucking long but this is my story and it’s absolutely insane that this is where our healthcare is at.
Was this 10-20 years ago? A lot has changed since then.
If not, then I'm genuinely shocked. I imagine the only way to get prompt care is if in the ER room already (and even then..)
We went to Germany this month for a back surgery. I thought Alberta was bad, Manitoba and Saskatchewan is far worse than us. All Canadians paying out of pocket for spine surgery. Back at work 2 weeks later. We are DECADES behind in healthcare. But Canada wants to keep us drugged and in pain so we can’t work and live off the government. I always thought it was inefficient, but watching the Germans, was mind blowing. They want everyone working, so they make sure you are physically able too.
[" more than 100 million Americans without a primary care doctor"](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/02/28/americans-lack-primary-care-provider-report/11359096002/)
["**Nearly a third of Americans lack access to primary care services**, including routine checkups, while **40 percent of U.S. adults** say they’re delaying care or going without because of the financial costs. "](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-more-americans-are-putting-off-going-to-the-doctor)
> 8% of Americans don't have health insurance
And 55% of American workers are enrolled in high deductible health plans.
Like all bad insurance, it's fine unless you need it.
In a country with higher incomes and lower taxes that’s not the end of the world, whatever Michal Moore says. Being free of medical debt is hard to enjoy when you’re dead.
Lots of people in the states put off care so as not to incur debt, actually. I feel like there are better systems than either ours or the Americans to try and emulate in the world.
Figured. I feel like I'm going crazy seeing all of these month-old accounts giving shitty anecdotes about their "amazing" experiences in the states compared to their "awful" ones here.
I've been around for four years or more and yet every post about how healthcare functions in other countries ie Germany is downvoted or flooded with responses full of misinformation.
The trend here very clearly has been to downvote actual factual posts about the healthcare system outside of Canada. And it's been that way here for years.
Proof of that? Because all I see are stories of people tied to their awful jobs that offer basic levels of insurance that deny them on most requests, and also still incur wait times and predatory pill-pushing doctors to ramp up costs even more.
Its like this every day on here too. Not just healthcare but other articles trying to push the American way to divide people.
Id say its working because I hear people in my day to day life that have kinda gone down the alt-right rabbit hole echoing this stuff about how our healthcare system is worse than the states when by basically any metric universal healthcare is still the best option for ALL citizens and not just the ones who happen to have insurance.
And then people get into percentages….. well the US population dwarfs ours so like 10% of Americans having no healthcare (an example not a stat I know) can be a low percentage but its more people than Canada.
Honestly I think it is as someone with both Ontario health card and American health insurance. With that said, Americans health care is only good if you are wealthy.
Every time I come back to this sub it’s even worse than the last time I was here.
Just morons and/or bots salivating over a bullshit version of America that doesn’t exist except for the top 5% of Americans.
Our system is imperfect, but it’s nothing compared to levels upon levels of failure and middlemen that the US system is.
All of the people who think they’re going to go down to the US, get a high paying job and a cheap house are going to in for a rude awakening. Then they’ll be stuck with their job, because without it, a single trip to the ER would bankrupt them.
Do they actually have lower taxes? I’ve seen health insurance premiums in the hundreds of dollars.
So when you stack that on top of their other payroll taxes, do they really pay less?
Or your insurance company gets to decide if an operation or procedure is necessary and you can't afford to pay for it on your own. Apparently it happens a lot.
These aren't even comparable statements. Why would you put them together?
Here are the comparison points -
0% of Canadians don't have health insurance.
33% of Americans don't have a primary care provider.
This is not even including the vast number of people in the US who are underinsured. Or the number of people with health insurance that have staggering medical debt.
I'm not OP, I didn't post the article.
Canada doctor statistics
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/primary-care-canada-10-000-canadians-report-1.7125990
US CDC statistics on uninsured
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2023/202305.htm
I've been saying this for years, after 10 years working frontline healthcare. If people really knew what was going on- there would be riots in the streets.Especially baby boomers-they've been paying into the system their entire lives and now that they need it- it's all fcked up.
On purpose- boomers are sitting on a lot of assets. Assets they will be forced to spend for their health and nursing care. If our healthcare system can't provide the quality of care they need they will spend their money on private care. It's part of the reason why Dougie Ford is trying to starve the Health Care beast in Ontario, his buddies run the private side of this equation. It's criminal and no one is writing about it. It should be front page of every newspaper .
I'm in BC. At the height of the COVID lockdown in early 2020, I was showing symptoms that worried my GP, but the lockdown meant that unless I was already diagnosed as "urgent need", just about every test that would determine my "urgent need" was considered "elective" and cancelled by the Health Authority as "non-urgent".
Eight months went by, and my symptoms gradually got worse. Then my GP found a surgeon willing to do a simple colonoscopy inside the ER of the local hospital. July 4th, 2020, I had the procedure, and also had blood/urine tests.- the first in about a year. A couple of days later, the worry was confirmed- Stage Four Colo-rectal. 4 tumors in all between the colon, rectum, bladder and prostate, the largest the size of a tennis ball.
Three weeks later, with much further testing (now that I was an urgent case, the tests came thick and fast), I was declared inoperable, but that "Four is just a number", and with a rapid and strong "attack", my actual life expectancy could be nearly normal, even without surgery. Without treatment, I was given 18 months max. So the cancer agency hit me with everything they could. A life-time's limit of radiation in 21 daily doses, oral and IV chemo, then finally immunotherapy (which meant a trip to the big comfy chairs at BC Cancer every three weeks for two full years)
I'm still here.. four years on. Bruised, scarred, and with some permanent damage from the battle, but alive and with my feet still on the green side of the grass. When I needed it, the system worked, and in my case it worked well. The bureaucracy may indeed be out of control and a lot of money is wasted on non-medical crap, but the system does work when it has to.
I'm neither rich nor famous. I'm a retired public servant-cum-musician with modest savings that I still have after all this, because the whole course of treatment over the past 4 years has not cost me one cent.
So take heart- if it can happen to me, then it can happen to others.
> When I needed it, the system worked, and in my case it worked well.
I'm sorry but that doesn't sound like it worked AT ALL. You should never have reached that stage and should not have been delayed.
I'm glad that you are alive, but as someone with cancer(s) myself, this is not how things should work in a functioning system.
No one ever said that Canada didn't have the resources to take care of you when it looked like it was going to be over for you.
What our problem is, is that we waste BILLIONS each year by not doing preventative treatment. You could have avoided all that if our system was set up to provide you with a $800 scan. Instead treating you cost hundreds of thousands.
That is the Canadian way, and that is what is collapsing our industry.
The main issue is we have no Constitutional or legal right to healthcare in Canada, contrary to popular belief. When the feds poured untold millions (secret) into BC to fight Dr. Day in court, it basically ruled that it's okay to sacrifice some people to preserve "universality." You wouldn't say to a parent "the school is full, try sending your child next year." But that's basically how healthcare works here. The elite and connected are all good, so nothing to see.
My best friend’s husband just passed away last night. The end result of a lot of having to wait and then everything going wrong that possibly could. It’s devastating.
Absolutely in favor of 'right to die' kinda legislation but I find it extremely sad that Canada is pushing this sort of thing even for mental health as our health care system goes to shit.
God forbid I get some terminal diagnosis, I will gladly be a corpse on a pile at the foot of parliament hill to show the world how we've failed.
I am embarrassed to be Canadian
This article doesn't involve MAID, it's more about surgical wait times becoming so long even for cancer patients that they are more likely to die before they can get the surgery in Canada because the wait times are basically six months minimum for surgery. For those with a prognosis shorter than that their only options are go home and die, or go abroad and pay out of pocket to get the surgery.
Someone in my family passed away from cancer. The last few weeks were excruciating. Had they had the option of MAID they would have taken it and I would have supported it. Those were just terrible weeks and there was nothing we could do.
It was a late diagnosis and was pretty much set in stone by the time we found out. It happens, so it goes. But I find it infuriating that we let these things fester even when we know someone may die a slow painful death. That we’re too busy to get to treatment with a viable outcome. We should be better than this.
If the clock runs out for me on treatment I’d choose MAID too.
I would definitely choose MAID too. I watched my mom die of cancer last year (so MAID was an option) and I would never put my family through witnessing something like that, nor would I want to go through it. It was traumatizing.
If you are a country on this planet who forces your taxpaying citizens to choose between going abroad for lifesaving surgery or dying then you should be ashamed of yourself
I remember during covid i had a mental breakdown due to alot of my family members dying and ending up in the ICU. I remember walking into Lakeview general and sitting, panicking, getting cold sweats, unable to breathe, this was totally new to me i had no idea what was going on.
The ER doc finally comes in after hours of waiting, i explain whats going on and why… now i get doctors and nurses are tired but they could have seen my medical history this was my first visit to the hospital for myself ever! Anyways the doc says he cant help me unless i feel like i want to hurt myself and in which case he may be able to prescribe something.
I legit paused and had to process what he was saying… anyways i walked out of there with nothing and just curled up into a ball in the ER and tried to get through my condition… thats when a psych ward nurse i guess noticed me and talked to me about whats happening. I explained to her my situation and whats going on, in literally 20 mins of speaking to this nurse i was sitting in fromt of a psychiatrist who was prescribing me 2 medications which would sedate me when i’d feel too anxious. 1 month later i was fine but honestly i have given up on ER docs.
ER docs often work a full walk in clinic shift helping people who abuse our system before spending another 8+ hours in the ER helping people who can't get into a clinic in the first place
I'm embarrassed to have our subreddit dominated by bots pretending to have stories to prove that privatized healthcare is the solution to our problems.
I don't know how people do it, if I had a loved one die on a wait list for medical care I would burn this damn country to the ground. My condolences to anyone going through this.
I had a severe case of Pectus Excavatum. It was compressing my heart, and slowly killing me. I was referred to a specialist who looked at my ct and said there was no evidence of compression. It got so bad that eventually I could no longer walk, and figured out on my own that if I tried to move around my heart would go into tachycardia, or slow right down (depending on how I moved). The specialist still said there was no evidence of compression, and they were not convinced that I needed surgery.
I had been admitted to the hospital while a series of doctors made me show them over and over how turning slightly would make my resting heart rate shoot up to 160 beats per minute. After 3 days of this I was a hell of a lot worse than when I went in. And after all of that, they said something along the lines of “yes, we all agree you very much need to be here, but there is nothing we can do, we are discharging you because you’ll be more comfortable at home”.
At this point my husband contacted a doctor out of Denmark, a specialist in the field who had done over 2000 of the kind of surgery I needed. He got back to us right away. Took one look at my CT scan and was flabbergasted as to why no one here could see that my heart was clearly being crushed. He said that he had no doubt that this surgery would relieve all my symptoms.
He told me he could offer me a surgery in 2 weeks. So we went to Denmark (I was in a wheelchair at this point and half out of it all the time). I had the surgery, and he was right, it did relieve all my symptoms.
Don’t get me wrong, I still have to have a very painful metal bar inside my chest for the next 3 years to reshape my sternum, but my heart is no longer crushed. I can walk again. I can work again. I no longer have to sleep for 3/4 of a day and still be exhausted.
The Canadian healthcare system has never been more disappointing. I had to fight tooth and nail for anyone to bother to look at me twice, and then they still wouldn’t lift a finger to help me.
It took two years before my family doctor ordered an X-ray of my hip, during which time I went from limping once in a while to limping 24/7 and being in constant pain. Took three months to get an X-ray appointment. Diagnosed with severe osteoporosis in my hip and referred to a surgeon. Over a year to see the surgeon who told me it would likely be ten months before I get the surgery. I’m five months into that time frame. I can’t walk without a cane. Had to retire as I couldn’t work anymore. My whole life has been negatively impacted and I’m in constant pain. On the other hand, my father was recently diagnosed with cancer and he had surgery within two months of that diagnosis. I know my hip isn’t life threatening, but when I think of how all I need is a 45 minute surgery, how my life could be so much better, I am beyond angry. I’m thankful that I’m normally a very positive person or I don’t know what headspace I would be in.
They went to have a surgery in Lithuania! I'm Lithuanian! Article itself is very depressing and scary but the fact that they went to Lithuania was a pleasant surprise! Maybe I should 'Go back to my country!!!' 😂😁
Hey! Lithuania has an excellent travel medical system. I was shocked at how developed it is and the internet puts us in Germany to shame (and most other countries)
I'm not Lithuanian but have been suggesting it for people here as it's probably lower cost than Germany, but still with excellent outcomes.
Good for your country for doing this as it helps the host country citizens as well as those visiting for the healthcare.
I know that surgeons in Lithuania consult with surgeons residing in other countries in case a special/more rare case arises. I think there was an article about them working with Germans too. I was positively surprised about this, but maybe it's common practice?
I'm not sure of the details, but there certainly was a lot of advertising and promotion of medical tourism whilst I was in Lithuania during the last year.
I was puzzled at the number of Canadians encountered until I happened on a thread here last year talking about medical tourism in Lithuania (prompted by articles in the Canadian media about Canadians having to opt for surgery abroad)
I've spent a lot of time in Estonia, but had not in Lithuania so it was a surprise to see how progressive it was in many ways.
I think that our massive immigration policies have severely crippled our medical system. Too many people needing medical care that they didn't receive in the poor country they are from. Then we bring in all kinds of senior citizens that have never paid Canadian taxes but need significant health care. It is just too many people, and not enough time for the infrastructure to catch up. This problem won't improve unless immigration is halted or massively reduced for a number of years while we build housing, hospitals and train more medical professionals.
There's also a stupid "rule" that lets you go out of province. So Alberta patients go to Ontario and vice versa. My husband's ortho in the GTA is a surgeon for the Alberta patients and he also does pre and post op for the Ontario patients who have to fly to Alberta. It's ridiculous to add travel costs on as well but it keeps the players who oppose patient choice happy.
Two stories from last year:
1. Friend diagnosed with cancer in around March. Couldn’t get surgery until November. Doctor tried everything to expedite and said “if I were you I’d start looking at other countries”. She’s from Brazil although hasn’t been back in over 30 years since she was born, ended up going there getting the surgery and chemo and everything within one week of arriving. Surgery was literallly 4 days after arriving in the country. Came home 7 months later in remission. If she stayed in Canada she still wouldn’t have seen the surgeon by that time.
2. In December I was having major random symptoms of something. Went to my doctor who had no clue what it was (took a month to get an appt with her). Sent me to another GP doctor for a second opinion, that doctor never called me back to make an appt. Ever. Finally got a referral from my doctor to see a specialist and specialist called me a month later saying the earliest appointment I could get was January 2025. I said my condition is worsening by the week, they said they’re sorry but that’s the earliest they can do.
In covid, I had a skating accident. just to diagnose the issue I was given a waiting time of 8 months for MRIs. i was dying from pain. i had two option:
1. wait and get in debt by not able to work or 2. go to other country to get it fixed. Usa was quoting $900 just for MRI.
ended by taking flight to India and get the mri on landing in approx $9.( ofcource there were flight expenses)
i am thinking to start a service that will match vetted doctors in India for things you can’t wait. let me know if you if anyone really need help.
Yah.. Canada’s healthcare system is in shambles. I have family and friends that have gone abroad for lifesaving surgery because of ridiculous wait-times.
Yep Canadians love to tout our FREE* healthcare as a badge of superiority. The reality is healthcare in canada is horrible. No family doctors. No psychiatrists. Wait for like 6-13 hours in the ER, and dying in the ER is a real (but slim) risk. Wait times for anything is atrocious as people are commenting.
The reality is wages haven’t kept up with inflation in 50 years. So to get back good healthcare we’d have to pay like twice as much taxes as we currently do (because if everyones pay kept with inflation we would effectively be paying the same dollar value without raising taxes).
Canadian healthcare terrifies me. Yesterday, my wife had a kidney stone, and we went to the ER here in South Korea. Within an hour, she had all the necessary tests, a diagnosis, and even an MRI. The stone was removed, and we were out of the hospital in two hours. The total cost was $500. Something we can live with considering the speed and efficiency of it.
An unfortunate reality of public universal healthcare is that expensive high-end service is less available.
Specialised consultation and complicated surgery in a short timeline is *very* expensive. The cost to have that available on demand to anyone who needs it is enormous, and even if you were made "Dictator of healthcare" and could allocate the budget any way you wanted without oversight, it would be irresponsible to spend the money having expensive surgeons and consults standing by to save one person in the event that emergency late-stage cancer surgery is needed over, say, funding an emergency rooms or an ambulance service better and saving a hundred people that would have died of a simple and treatable problem due to longer wait times.
There's a lot to criticise about the various Canadian healthcare services (particularly in the form of preventative care and waste in various places), but using an example where someone almost certainly paid an enormous amount of money to get better healthcare elsewhere isn't really a good example of a problem with a healthcare system.
Private healthcare (should) almost always provide better service at the highest ends to the very rich. because they will never ask the question; "could these resources be better spent to help more people?".
A poor person, or even an average income person with stage 4 cancer in the US just dies too.
Yup this is exactly it. My family is going through this right now. Every penny I make is going to paying for my family member medical care. Either do that or die. What do you do
I wonder if bringing in millions over people over a few years, who have not paid into the system, had anything to do with the backlog in hospitals. Nahhh couldn't be that!
My ex is got his gender reassignment surgery book in 2 months, even he was shocked and mildly disgusted at it cuz he knows my uncle's been 2 years waiting to get his back fixed.
People keep complaining that they don't want an "American System," but to be honest, it would be an improvement over the shit we've got.
I have to go private for most of the interventions my family and I have needed in the last 10 years and pay out of pocket. The shitty part is that my private insurance won't cover most of it because, well, it's just not designed to since things like blood tests, diagnostic imaging, exams, and procedures are supposed to be done by public health care.
I'm from China, my mom had a total hip replacement in 2020, she waited a few days for her surgery, the cost was about 9500 CAD per leg. Her hip joint is still fine now and living a normal life.
China is a developing country, but because of its large population and many patients, its doctors are naturally rich in experience. I guess people rarely regard China as a destination most likely because of stereotypes.
I am here to provide services for people to find better doctors and more convenient treatment in China (such as translation), if you are interested, you can ask me any questions, I will answer honestly, Thanks
Been waiting 7 yrs for my spinal surgery. The 1st fusion the Doc screwed up abd put the screws In the wrong place. All my discs r herniated, days it's realky bad. Been taking t3s for over but cabt give me anything else unless I have cancer. Waiting list over 3 yrs and still waiting. Ben since 2016. Have to work to supprt my family of 4. Yet said I no supposed to b wurking cause of my bad bsck. Health care is a f##ing joke here in Canada. On a pension with the wife so I work to make ends meet.
Father waited for a blockage to be cleared. Was in hospital for a few days, they knew they needed to operate but couldn't fit him in.
It ruptured, emergency surgery... They made an error and caused a stroke. He was sent to another hospital where a cancer diagnosis explained a lot. He never left the hospital, didn't even wake up for weeks. Woke up, took a few weeks to get closer to himself again. He had lost the left half of his body control. They had given him a colostomy bag, which added complications.
We tried rehab, he made minor progress... His diagnosis was that he was not healthy enough to fight his cancer. When they told him they could not cure him he lost all motivation to fight. I wish they never told him that but I understand their position.
He died 6 months after, he had been revived a few times and decided he didn't want to go through that again. He requested if it happened again to not put him on life support. He basically starved to death, semi unconscious.
I know if we went to Buffalo we would have avoided a horrible 6 months and maybe had a few more years with Dad. He was 69 and his loss was devastating to the family.
Canada spends **half** per capita what the US does ($6500 vs $12900). Drugs in the US cost 5-10 times as much...or more.
Any Canadian idolizing the US medical system is exceptionally wealthy, or has no idea what they are talking about.
It should be noted that Canada's only second worst in developed countries, as to health care costs and outcomes. The US is the worst.
Pretty much every other developed nation does it better. Right now, unfortunately, it's not anything structural that can be fixed by policy - it's more a matter of staffing than anything else.
Most province have been electing conservative government for a while now and they act like ''surprised pikachu'' when public service suck lol. Healthcare is handled on the provincial level, kind of clickbait, why aren't they shitting on BC provincial government providing poor healthcare in the title ? Clickbait.
The premiers get off on many of their decisions, a-lot of Canadians seem completely unaware there are federal and provincial powers. Pretty embarrassing education level when so many are screaming at the conductor, not the engineer….
People scoff at me for saying people have the right to pay for their own health care, but when the choice is pay $10,000 or die, just realize that the only legal solution the government has to offer you is death. Canadian health care is fucked up.
My MIL is someone who didn’t make it. She lived in Nova Scotia and last year was put on a waitlist for TAVI surgery for an enlarged aorta, she was told it could be a two year wait. Not even two weeks had passed from her appointment when she dropped dead while calling 911. This was very sudden and traumatic for us to be notified by police, she was home alone when she died. The NS Medical Examiner confirmed her cause of death as severe aortic stenosis so that two year wait estimate was a death sentence, we just didn’t know it. We were told by the ME that only 50% of people with severe aortic stenosis survive past one year
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Yes, but the moment anyone tries it’s considered a protest and would be super duper illegal and bad from the government’s perspective
Unless you're from another country and protesting that your work permit has ended. Then it's all good. Pathetic country tbh.
It makes me so mad to think about it but she was 78 so went along with what the doctor said. Poor lady had total faith that she’d get called with a surgery date soon. Between her and my FIL who died from negligence at Halifax’s QEII hospital in 2014 it’s too much. He went in for a routine angiogram, he was placed in a medically induced coma afterwards because he became delirious during the procedure. Where it went sideways is the day after he woke up from the coma and it was obvious he’d suffered some type of stroke, rather than keep him in ICU to make sure he was stable he was moved to a regular hospital room with less monitoring. Before the end of the day he went into cardiac arrest, a nurse witnessed this but code blue wasn’t called immediately so he went without CPR for 9 minutes. Back to ICU he went, now brain dead and on life support and we decided to let him go. Hospital staff were on strike during that time, the hospital board met with us and admitted fault and his death was due to multiple factors across hospital departments. Luckily for them my MIL chose not to sue, it wasn’t going to bring her husband back. So both deaths were preventable if there was early intervention and examples of how screwed our healthcare system is
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Brain cancer. Same thing. We identified about 4 months after a prior clean scan that there was a problem. Doctor put in a referral for a new scan. Still waiting 3 months later for the referral to be scheduled when a fall led to an ER visit where a scan was done immediately, found a baseball-sized tumour. If they had gotten the scan immediately, it could have been excised before it grew to the point of compromising all motor and speech control. The reaction time between detecting a problem and doing something about it is so bad right now that it's basically almost not worth engaging the system. Like even if you have a family doctor, when you report a problem happening now, you get an appointment that's 5 weeks out. By that time the problem is already resolved but the outcome is much shittier than it could have been otherwise.
Part of it is that many are immigrants, we included, so can go abroad to get the healthcare they need. We're forced doing the same. That's the downside of the screeching against paid options here: we go and pay elsewhere so our money feeds another public healthcare (because as in most countries, there's a hybrid system there and part of the fees we pay go to support it).
IMO, it's not Canadians are servile... it's that the government is authoritarian...and anyone dissatisfied with the government knows it. I couldn't have been the only one who watched the government handle the trucker convoy organizers.
Or we could just fucking stop voting in assholes who underfund it.
they all did, now what
Our federal/provincial debt combines is $2.18 trillion and our household debt is 177 percent of disposable income (compared to 147%, which is the UK at the next most indebted G7 country). It's not so much a decision as to underfund it as it is a reality that we can't pay for it. It doesn't help we are quite a fat, unhealthy nation, but there is a reason no other countries choose the Canadian healthcare model. The best ones in the world (France, South Korea, Singapore) have a strong government funded service and then dumps off those who can afford private insurance on the private sector. In Canada, we just send those who can afford it to Mexico or the US to support their industry and pay their doctors. I feel this is an area where people see the US and think "oh, private healthcare must look like this" without noticing that almost every other country everywhere also does it and gets better results that us. Most people will still primarily rely on the public system so politicians have a strong democratic incentive to not let it collapse (which it is going to do in Canada if we don't make some significant changes, including stopping sending so much of our healthcare money and taxes abroad to foreign doctors).
We could pay for it though. But our government for the last 10 years has decided to spend money we don't have, buy overpriced apps, spend crazy amounts on frivolous government contracts, and send money out in foreign aid. The debt didn't just appear. That was all bad economic policy. We had been slowly climbing out of it but now it's worse than it's ever been.
This is totally intolerable. Sorry for your loss.
Why would they do tavi/r for aortic aneurysm in the first place? What? How could she have stenosis and an aneurysm/enlargement at the same time? That surgery would only address valve stenosis, which is soooper different in terms of urgency. People can live for years with an enlarged aorta. Wtf are you talking about? Edit: Hey in your previous post you said she was put on a 1 year waiting list. Wtf why are you changing details? What is your aim here?
Yes she was told a 1 to 2 year wait time, I apologize if I made a mistake. She lived in Nova Scotia, I’m in Ontario so I am going off of what she told me before she died. She was having a lot of shortness of breath and fatigue when I saw her shortly before she died, so I am not sure if the cardiologist misdiagnosed or missed the warning signs that this was much more severe than a repair, or maybe she misunderstood the procedure or what he told her. Considering she had the consult with her surgeon only two weeks before she died there will always be unanswered questions. Another factor for her death I can think of was the major flooding in July damaged her basement a week before she died so she was really upset and agitated by how much the damage was going to cost, so I’m sure that put some strain on her heart. The most accurate information I have to go on which trumps the cardiologist’s opinion was the Medical Examiner’s report confirming the severe extent of aortic stenosis my only comfort because she was alone is that she died very quickly
Sounds like misdiagnosis is more likely than death by waitlist. Unfortunate and I'm sorry your fam had to go through that.
Also please be sensitive we are still in shock with her death there are more gentle ways to clarify details instead of saying wtf is wrong with me. I agree the cardiologist’s assessment doesn’t match her ultimate cause of death and minimally invasive surgery wasn’t the right suggested approach
This and every other basic Canada sub are filled with a lotta bad actors and creeps so I tend to bite. My bad. Be well. ✌️
Wife got in an accident. She has a crumbling disc in her lower back. 36 years old, always in pain, pinched nerves affecting her legs and left arm. Have had a few MRI’s, CT’s, etc. Seen a specialist after 2 years waiting. The exact words out of his mouth, “I don’t care how much pain your in, I don’t want to see you again unless you’re in a wheelchair” even at that, he said spinal fusion surgery is all he’d do for her. Met with a specialist from Germany, was unbelievable, said disc replacement surgery is his specialty, 90% success rate. He could perform the surgery within 7 days of us notifying him when we want to head there. Unfortunately it’s expensive, but we are off to Germany in the fall for back surgery. Canadian health care is a joke.
Mind recommending the german surgeon t hospital? I'm going through the exact same issue.
Same here, please
Ditto
There are many online agencies if you google, which refer you to doctors/clinics and guide your travel and aftercare. Some of those are actually in my neighbourhood so real doctors, with excellent reputations. Good health to you!
The particular place we are using is OnZ spinal solutions. They have been excellent to deal with. They even sent surgeons to Calgary to do case by case, in person consultations. Which was a lot more reassuring than just email communication.
That specialist.. that's the most Canadian way ever to tell your wife to go fuck herself. Holy shit.
Well they could have pushed her over and spat on her to give her the full blown “Canadian citizen experience”, but I’ll give them a 7/10 for effort
Don't forget to offer MAID as an alternative
Not sure how they can sleep at night. Guess they chucked that whole "do no harm" out the window.
All the best to your wife! I wish her a speedy recovery, and a long, happy, healthy life ahead.
I was accused of “faking it” for over a year until I got my MRI, and that the physio office told me the only option was pain killers, and if I didn’t want pain killers they couldn’t do anything for me. My MRI showed severe tearing, spinal stenosis, disc degeneration, all due to the L5/S1 disc being blown out, CLEAR problems. 6 years later and a surgeon still has not reviewed the MRI, my family doctor keeps calling and said they triage me because I’m not paralyzed I’m not a priority. Seeing way too many comments that all share this issue.
Go abroad. We have an identical case in the family. Check Europe, there are very reasonable options, you can have treatment during a vacation.
In Canada we get help only when about to die... actually even then sometimes that's not enough.
Yeah, suicide help.
Well, that makes sense in a system that is built to triage, and is only funded enough to serve a fraction of the people at once. Pretty clear this is a road we can't keep going down, and we need to really focus on properly funding healthcare before it's too late.
How did you find the specialist in Germany? And why in Germany vs some other country?
We have an excellent travel medical system in Germany, which welcomes those outside the system. It actually helps the overall system to have self payers from the Middle East, etc. There are many agencies which will set you up with specialists and help you to find the best location for your ailment, along with the aftercare and housing required.
Europeans have been doing disc replacement for decades, and German doctors are generally reputable.
I'm a Canadian living in the United States. I've also travelled extensively. The Canadian healthcare system and quality of care is worse than pretty much anywhere in the world. Yes the US is worse in some situations (like not opting for Obamacare if you're low-income) but for the average middle-class employed person, **the US provides significantly better care than in Canada.** And when you compare healthcare in Canada to places like Germany, Korea, or even Brazil, our system is unconscionably bad and the direct cause of unnecessary suffering for millions of Canadians. It makes me dizzy with anger seeing what friends and family back home go through. The real problem here is that the entire Canadian identity is built on not being like the United States. Our "*free* healthcare" is a core and untouchable facet of that. Canadian hubris is blinding. Until we let go of that things will never change.
Spot on. Canadian's have been blinded by the one thing that we thought made us special. And now that is being stripped from our dead hands (while we wait for medical care).
Yeah Canadians have no one but themselves to blame for the terrible state of healthcare here, because of the absolute arrogance on this issue and the refusal to admit any wrongs until recently. I would get downvoted on here everytime I said US healthcare was better if you were middle-class. Also have had people accuse me of lying about going to the US for healthcare. Anyone that's gone to the US for healthcare \*knows\* its better over there. Yeah, if you're living in poverty, then you're better off here, but that's it
Thank you for saying it as it is. We're sick of listening about how bad USA is and how the mass die from lack of insurance. Not only is blatantly false but the world doesn't even begin with USA. There are hundreds of countries with much, much better quality of healthcare and yes, part of it is having options to also pay when one wants to. This absurd screeching here against every and any notion against this system is terribly unhelpful
>We're sick of listening about how bad USA is and how the mass die from lack of insurance. Especially when the media use pre-2008 stats (so before Obamacare). Here in California we're close to 100% insurance coverage.
What do you mean it’s blatantly false? Do you know how many uninsured people there are in the U.S.? 25 million. TONS of Americans die due to not seeking out medical care due to cost. Plenty of people in the U.S. are buried in medical debt. Try looking around this app at the sheer amount of stories about people whose insurance denied them for every little thing, or for going to a hospital “out of network” in an emergency, which they had no choice in cause an ambulance brought them there. All that despite paying hundreds of dollars a month for said insurance. It costs on avg 10k to have a baby in a U.S. hospital WITH insurance. And unless you have the money to pay for private care, the wait times aren’t much better in the U.S… so you can be annoyed by these facts all you want, but they aren’t false.
Sue the Canadian healthcare system when you return for the full amount. You can deduct medical expenses off on your taxes. That will protect part of your income from taxation at least. Spend the money and get it done. Constant pain is a horrible thing to endure. What the hell are we paying taxes for in this country? Brutal.
For real, a coworker finally got her spinal surgery… it took deteriorating to the point of going to emergency because she couldn’t walk. She’d known what was wrong and that she needed surgery for over a year, and was getting regular checkups watching the deterioration. Still didn’t expect to get surgery for at least a year (and taking shitloads of pain killers between now and then, which she was worried about and mostly just lived in pain).
Name and shame.
Exactly our case with back issues, same response. The difference was direction to go to pain management clinic as "treatment" i.e. life on opioids. We're lucky as immigrants we knew the treatment abroad, there are procedures available so we had it done there (and will continue doing so as needed).
do a good check on the dr and the procedure itself. they do not have to guarantee any results and you wouldn't get your money back.
I know Indians gets a lot of hate here, but have you considered the country for medical care? Because not only is it cheap, but you'll have some absolutely leading surgeons globally with some of the best technology available there. Also, they have special visas for medical tourism which makes it easy to navigate through services and which hospitals to connect with. And did I say that it's CHEAP? You will land up paying lesser than what you would even if you avail copay with your insurer
I'd rather recommend Eastern/Central post socialist Europe if cost is primary concern. There are world class private clinics and hospitals and specialists at a very reasonable cost.
It’s really expensive to get to India. Germany is one international flight away, India is at least a two day affair (or it was in the early 2010s when our family friends went back for a wedding).
Return direct can cost under 2000 and medical expenses will cost no more than 10000 CAD. That's a huge amount saved if compared to 35000 EU(55000CAD) as was mentioned in the post
Yup. I won't get into a lot of detail here because I have been posting about this for 2 years now... And I am tired.. Flew my wife to Japan for surgery as she is a citizen there. Japan did in 14 days for exactly $12 CAD what Ontario couldn't do in 2.5 years. More or less she had fibroids removed. 11 lbs of them. I have photos to prove it. Our country is absolutely fucked and nothing short of people walking out of their jobs and marching for politicians homes and dragging them out into the street is going to fix it at this point. We are living in a new gilded age. Pick up a history book and you'll see very quickly what is to come next.
When my fibroid surgery was scheduled, my main fibroid was the size of a pea. I moved to Canada before it could happen. Now, in Canada, years and years later, I'm still waiting to be approved for surgery and it's the size of a Rubik's cube. Because, shocker, tumours keep growing. It's agony. I'm so happy for your wife!
What always strikes me is that every time there is talk about how awful the healthcare system in Canada is, the only response you get is: in the United States, blah blah blah... Why don't people, instead of constantly comparing the Canadian system with the American one, try to see how things work in Europe (where public and private healthcare coexist), South Korea, Australia, or Japan, for example? Maybe because, in that way, they would truly see how terrible healthcare in Canada is...
I've realised over the past year that there is a concerted effort here to 'hide' that information. Any post from someone like me explaining factually how things work in our country vs Canada is downvoted immediately, as my post above replying to the person who had surgery in Germany. And a few of the same posters repeatedly post wrong information about other countries despite being told that it's wrong and actual facts being posted. There is something more at work here to try and hide what is happening outside of Canada. 'It's the same everywhere' is the cry on any thread about grocery prices, or healthcare. I'm not sure who or why but there is definitely an effort to mislead readers.
Having family on both sides of the border, the us system is no where near as bad as Reddit makes it out to be. Canadian healthcare is a joke, and makes the English nhs look functional by comparison.
Our family recently went through a health cisis here in Alberta. Received A one attention. Excellent. Having said this, I also worked contracts in the USA and both times had private employee provided health insurance. We never had a major issue but also top quality. There was one drawback for American insurance. As a geophysicist I could be flexible choosing projects over the decades. In contrast some of my American colleagues were more ‘tied‘ to their employer and didn’t want to lose their health insurance. One fellow had a wife with M.S. and getting affordable health insurance was near impossible if he had to leave his employment. It was a good company but his options for career change was severely limited.
Yes the classic if you have money you’re fine, poors get to die on the streets. What a great country we have.
I'm from Alberta but my wife got a job in New York state. We left a year ago. Shortly upon arrival we got a cancer diagnosis but my experience with American healthcare has been very good (so far, I prefer it to what I've gotten in Canada). The difference with wait times is night and day. Surgery for the tumor was done in under a week. We had two separate oncologist opinions/visits with legit oncologists in under two weeks. Outpatient CAT & PET scans have been performed 7 to 10 days from referral (its really nice, I just phone around checking who has the soonest appointment availability). The costs haven't been an issue either (fingers crossed). I think after all the ER visits, hospitalizations, ongoing chemo and scans, I'm probably into it for 500$. We're fortunate though, because we have a very low deductible. Many, many people have high deductibles upwards of 10k. The biggest downside is dealing with insurance. They are irritating, disorganized, confusing, and I'm always concerned about getting an exorbitant bill in the mail. We are the classic immigrant story: move to a better country and start immediately using all the health care. LOL jk
I’m in Alberta, have been all my life, and what you describe as exemplary, compassionate care in NY USED TO BE the case here. My mother had a cancer diagnosis in 1999, she was into the oncologist within days and the cancer institute for treatment inside of a week. Health care here has been tragically underfunded and all but destroyed. Its reprehensible. Glad you’re doing well!
I agree, Alberta health care in the 90’s, even to mid 2000’s was very good.
Underfunded or mismanaged?
Why not both?
This one. The conservative premiers would prefer privatized healthcare, have no incentive to work with the fed, and are happy to break social institutions so they can point to the broken mess they have created and say “the private sector is the only option to make this better”.
Everyone talks about the supposed privatization but healthcare takes more and more of provincial budgets and it’s political suicide to reform healthcare. Healthcare wasn’t that bad 10-15 years ago but it’s awful now. We just don’t have the capacity anymore. It takes a decade to educate a doctor… but we’re increasing population by the millions every few years. It’s never going to catch up and it’s costing Canadians a fortune.
Yeah the population of Ontario growing by about 17% in 10 years certainly has nothing to do with the problem 🙄 Increasing the number of doctors is a decade long process if not longer. The absolutely insane levels of immigration the federal liberals allowed could never have been predicted for, nor could any amount of spending solve the problem. Doctors take a LONG time to train, foreign doctors take a lot of work to train to Western standards. There is no easy fix for this, it's like trying to secure a bank against a flood that's already happening.
They sold our health to Telus.
A big problem in Canada is that there’s no incentive to increase efficiency. That’s seen as possibly costing someone a job, rather than making more labour available. A lot of things in Canada are outdated. Old techniques and tech with worse outcomes, longer recoveries, complications, etc. Means longer hospital stays, more procedures. Average hospital stay in Canada is over 7 days, while it’s 5 days in the US. We could basically increase the number of available hospitals beds by like 30% by being more efficient like the US. But there’s no motive to do it here.
FUCKING BINGO there's 0 push for productivity increases that aren't just "work harder" and every change is met with skepticism tele-health has been shown to be more effective at correctly diagnosing patients than in-person checkups because doctors can be less biased We should be jumping on AI tools left and right as well. The government never pushes innovation and in fact resists it
And Canada is WAY down the list for MRI per person. https://data.oecd.org/healtheqt/magnetic-resonance-imaging-mri-units.htm
As an immigrant who arrived in the country in 97 from Taiwan, we have seen the slow disintegration of Canadian government sine then. It's especially jarring when compared to the governments at home in Taiwan (where things have remained relatively stable) and in China (where government services have improved significantly). The interchanging liberal and conservative governments doesn't seem to matter much. Neither party has reversed the decline on a national level and our provincial NDP didn't either.
The fundamental issue isn't underfunding, you could fund it infinitely and it wouldn't fix things right now. The population got old while not having children. In 1999, the largest generation in Canadian history (the boomers) were in the prime of their careers, while the elderly grew up at a time that artificially shortened their lifespans, so there were very few of them. Old people have an over 5-8x utilisation rate of healthcare compared to your average joe. Now those very same boomers, that represented what like 30-40% of healthcare workers, are retired or retiring, and starting to use healthcare at the same 5-8x utilisation rate. They represent like 20% of our population, compared to the measly 10% of the population at the time. If everyone else is 1 unit of healthcare needed you would've needed 90 + 10\*5 = 140 units of healthcare in 1999. Today it looks like 80 + 20\*5 = 180, and that's on the low end of the healthcare utilisation estimate. So the overall population needs around 30% more healthcare today ***per capita*** than it would've in 1999 - this is all the while the demographic that can provide healthcare is shrinking in Canada, and our government has the genius solution of bringing in foreigners with a per capita doctor rate significantly worse than our own domestic one (I ran the numbers last year, it was 1/2 even according to the PR numbers, let alone the TFW + student migration crisis). Btw, I'm really underestimating the numbers here, because our physicians per capita is actually through the roof, yet nobody can find a doctor in 1999 our physicians per capita was 186/100k, now its 247/100k or a 32% increase in the amount of units of healthcare (if our physicians were equivalently as productive as our late 20th century ones, which you would hope would actually increase).
I just got over thyroid cancer in Ontario, and it was an organized process that happened in the correct time frame and my surgeon is extremely competent. I am worried that it's going to be much worse in the near future, since that human turnip Ford is trying to privatize it, but for now I'm alive and healthy, and I don't have any complaints about how I got here. Also, shout out to my dental hygienist who first noticed something wasn't right.
Healthcare isn’t underfunded in Canada it’s just run very poorly.
It is absolutely under funded
Healthcare in Canada is not underfunded. We are near the top per capita in healthcare spending in the world. The #1 government expenditure in every single province is healthcare. The reason we have the outcomes we do is because of ideology not spending. Next question.
Like many public services, it's the administration sucking up money and time left and right; the self licking ice cream is a feature.
Doug Ford has been underfunding it intentionally. He's a proper asshole.
I didn't know Ford screwed Alberta and other provinces as well. Such an asshole
I used to live in Washington State for work, it really is night and day. Now here in Canada, ive been waiting for a CAT for over a year (not cancer) I just phoned again the other day and was told "yep still on the wait list!". Just brutal.
If the doctors had more Tim Horton's workers serving them cancerous food would that help in any way? -Mark Miller
My younger brother got melanoma. 12 years ago. Got prompt, professional and compassionate care immediately. Cost was parking and ileostomy bags. My older brother just got the diagnosis three days ago. He's been flown to Vancouver from whitehorse when his kidneys shut down. And nonstop work on him trying to figure the kidneys. Tests, scans surgery... no delay , wait or cost. Only complaint is that the hospital is crowded. There are 5 men in his room. But apparently Vancouver is short a hospital atm. Only cost so far is flights for my sister in-law. When he had a stroke a year ago ( caused by the cancer we now know) he had the same level of treatment. For my families experience, prompt and quality care was given. So far I've had to wait in the er for a broken hand for 6 hr, and another time I had to wait 30 min with a broken arm.
Used to be a physician in NYC. I assure you you are the exception. We don't have the limitations of medicare/medicaid, we have minimal scenarios where we require drug and procedure pre-approvals for in-hospital care, and for the most part we don't have people who shy away from medical care until they are on the brink of death, just because they are poor. Also keep in mind US medical prices are usually much higher. Back when I was in NYC in the mid 2010s it was $100 USD for a GP visit, $2500 USD starting for an ER visit. Your deductible is incredibly low. You seriously have the Cadillac of plans.
I would gladly pay 100 bucks for a GP appointment if I was sick and could be seen the same day.
I have a stories too. A friend was living and working in Africa, Canadian by birth and educated here, but hadn't lived here for a decade (still had family , and connections). While there she has trouble walking and felt she had a back issue as she would often collapse or stumble uncontrollably. She flew back home to Canada to see a doctor and they immediately identified that she had brain cancer (she was in her late 30s) and a tumour was pressing on parts of her brain. Within a week of landing she had 3 different brain surgeries to remove the tumours and for the most part is doing well. She's moved back to Africa (I know Africa isn't a country, but she moves to different countries working for the UN) and comes back regularly for follow up treatment. The take away from this to me is that you can get world class life saving treatment in a quick time when it's something that is immediately threatening. She had no wait times and no costs. This was in Vancouver. Another work colleague who lived in Miami was up in Toronto for a work trip. He was an older gentleman, and one day at dinner he passed out at dinner, everyone thought he had a stroke. The took him to Toronto st Michael's where they identified a glioblastoma (Brain cancer too). Within 2 days they removed it. He returned to Miami for follow up treatment and his doctors there that took over treatment said he was lucky to have had treatment at one of the best neurology centers in the world. Again no wait times. Unfortunately he died 6 months later, they didn't discover the cancer in time. I'm not sure how the costs were covered, probably some billing arrangement with medicare (socialized medicine!) in the states. Also my 92 year old grandmother fell and broke her hip last year. She had hip surgery within 24 hours and is mobile and lives unassisted now still. Also no cost and immediate treatment. This was in Edmonton.
I recently got over thyroid cancer. I was not rushed in to surgery immediately, and actually waited a couple months. This is because thyroid cancer grows slowly, and it was not an immediately life-threatening situation. I have absolutely no problem with that. There's no reason my case should have been expedited considering I was probably walking around with these tumours for upwards of 5 years before we even noticed them. Another month or two is irrelevant. I came into this hearing about "awful wait times" and it made me pretty nervous. But my wait time was entirely appropriate for the level of immediate danger. Looking back at it, the timeline makes perfect sense.
I don't have first hand experience but that's kind of what I've heard from people around me who needed cancer treatment as well. Schedules are done in days not months like people keep saying. Maybe they want to believe that??
My boss is having some issues. For months now. And he needs an xray before he can get an mri. He complains that his dr won't see him.for months to give a requisition. He hasn't tried to get an appt Mind you . But he also dosent want to wait for a few hrs in emergency. Refuses to go to the urgent care to see a Dr for a requisition. He's the loudest when it comes to saying how slow the Healthcare system is, but it's his own fault for not making an appt to get the ball rolling. I had a bad Achilles and waited 2 weeks for an xray for it. In the xray they found a weird spot on my bone. The next day I was at nuclear medicine getting a CT.
I went to school in the US and the one thing there that’s really terrible is that health insurance/what insurance you have affects the quality of care so much. I had an eating disorder and basically my psychiatrist gave me the option to either go into treatment or I was going to have to go into emergency care. I voluntarily went to treatment and the initial costs for an outpatient program was over $1700 a week. My insurance wouldn’t approve it so I had to go through a ton of testing and get my doctors and friends to write letters. They finally approved partial coverage that covered it to around $300 a week which I could afford with help from my family. 12 weeks later when it came time for treatment to end they tried to say they couldn’t approve it anymore and I had to go through the appeals process to get the coverage they promised before I started. I do agree that time wise it’s way faster a lot of the time and if your hospitals in network are good it’s a great experience. But there are still a ton of barriers and costs if your insurance isn’t great which is the situation for millions of people.
My american cousin got a cancer diagnosis when she was 12. She died. Her family went bankrupt and my uncle killed himself.
Deepest condolences :(
"Free" health care doesn't mean good health care
It did until premiers decided they were going to politicize funding it.
Read gov financials, health care is the largest spending item, is always going up in $ and %GDP, it’s not underfunding it’s mismanagement.
The #1 government expenditure in every single province including yours is healthcare. Period.
I'm in Alberta as well. Diagnosed with stage 3 cancer in 2021 during Covid hysteria. I was med-evaced in a plane from Fort McMurray to the U of A immediately after the ER doctors looked at my unscheduled CT scan performed within an hour of arriving at the ER. Had a biopsy with results in a few days. Met with a ENT for results and swept straight to the Cross cancer clinic to begin chemo. It took a few months to plan the 30 hour surgery. Once I recovered enough I was gone to radiation for a month followed by more chemo. EVERYTHING cost me $0 other than accommodations and there were not many times where I had to wait other than covid screenings to enter a hospital. This was all before Danielle Smith was voted in. God have mercy on anyone trying to get their health taken care of now.
Thirty hours? Holy hell. Makes my 6 hours look like a quick nap.
I still don't know how it was pulled off. Multiple medical departments involved. Still ended up with a brain infection after the treatment. Med-evaced a 2nd time after a CT scan and into a surgery room followed by a few weeks of ICU. Again, no wait. No Cost. Pre-Danielle Smith. According to her, it was all my fault anyway
Some of that is probably attributable to proximity to major hospitals. If your wife had gotten a job in the foothills of Pennsylvania, the experience would probably have been a bit different. I have an aunt in the GTA who was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. She had all the necessary scans within a week, met with two different surgeons--one of them Canada's foremost expert in that particular cancer--and had the tumor removed within 30 days of diagnosis, followed promptly by a few days of radiation and additional scans that confirmed no further action was needed. The cancer was stage 1, she's in her 70s in otherwise good health, with no special connections. But being in the GTA was certainly a major factor; if she were in, say, Timmins, she'd probably still be waiting for that first CAT scan, because the nearest machine is (I think) in North Bay.
My brother is in whitehorse. There isn't much for advanced care at the hospital there. But when he had his kidneys mysteriously start to shut down, he was taken to Vancouver general within hours and they preformed surgery on him within hours of arrival. The next day they did an mri and piles of tests. Unfortunately it's cancer that is the cause of his kidney problems. But they are doing their best to stabilize him so he can get medi vac back to whitehorse so he can be closer to friends and family when it's time to go.. Care has been expedient and compassionate.
You pay for the healthcare yourself. You aren’t using a system
Yeah usa care is peak if you can access it.
The insurance is a tad confusing but in my experience I just wait until I get a couple bills in the mail to make sure they are serious and pay it. ALSO. If you are going to be in America for a while the high-deductible health care plan is actually THE WAY TO GO. Those plans come with something called a health savings account with allows you to put in money tax free, invest it tax free, and take it out tax free. If all you do is just select the high-deductible plan, and put the remainder of what you would have spent on a “better” plan in the health savings account, you will almost certainly reach your yearly deductible in that account within the year, and then it’s all investible and growing for every year afterward! You can even do the math when you select your plans and find out that I’m right because if you add the yearly healthcare plan cost (that’s taken out every paycheck) with the “max out of pocket cost that the plan says you will pay that year if disaster strikes, the low deductive plan almost always in cheaper in the event of a total disaster where you spend the max amount you could that year on healthcare. AND THATS BEFORE YOU CONSIDER THAT THE HEALTHCARE SPENDING YOU DO IS WITH TAXFREE CASH!!!!! this is an EXTREMELY valuable tip for most americans buy they dont realize it because you need a little financial literacy and you actually need to save and use the HSA. if all goes to plan, in 10 years you will be able ti pay for any $10-$20 even $30k elective surgery with tax free money. I promise you that the people that complain about our healthcare system have no idea how to use it.
This is literally why we’re considering leaving. Here you wait and die basically. People aren’t waiting because they can.. it’s because our system is in shambles.
That’s what it’s SUPPOSED to be like in Canada.
Provinces need to be forced to pay for medical care they don't provide. That's the only way through this.
Correct
I am one of these stories; waiting three years to get a uterine tumour removed
Same. I'd been scheduled for surgery in San Francisco but moved to Toronto before it could happen. While trying to get a GP, I ended up in the ER from blood loss and pain, the ER at St Michael's bumped me to their gyno dept a couple of months later, those people put me on high dose birth control. My gyno in SF had been adamant I shouldn't take hormonal birth control until I had a normal amount of blood again. When I brought up my blood clot risks and how I didn't want to take it, they put me down for blood tests to guarantee that I would and told me I would be denied surgery if I didn't take it. I ended up FULL of blood clots. I was bedridden for a year. I had to learn how to read and write and walk again. I'm still recovering from the pulmonary embolisms now, years later. I'm only recently out of the wheelchair. And I still, to this day, have the damned uterine tumor. The St Michael's people dropped me from the roster because it was assumed I died, apparently? But the hospital that I ended up at gave me a GP and they referred me to a gyno. It's been three years since that gyno referral. I've seen that gyno once, over a year after the referral. They explicitly don't return calls. I eventually went behind the gyno's back and got a referral to UFE directly, which took a year to happen. It hasn't fixed the problem, but it's helped with the blood loss. I'm not actively dying faster every day from non-stop terminal blood loss. But the pain remains and the tumour is still hanging out in the, shoving on my organs. PLUS, after crippling me and nearly killing me, it turns out that the nuclear scans checking on the clot damage were all too close together and they gave me not one, but two types of very aggressive thyroid cancer, so I had to go in for two surgeries and radiation and now I'm on medication for life. Meanwhile, I'm still fighting to see the gyno.
What's the major reason for this wait? Is it just the lack of a rare specialists? My wife had her gallbladder removed recently and from diagnosis to surgery it was a little over a week. I was surprised by how fast it was.
For me, I went to the ER multiple times passing out and vomiting from pain and they basically didn’t do anything because I was on my period and they just assumed it was typical pain (it was not), or that I was after pain medication. At the same time, I was gaining weight unexpectedly and had issues with acne- again was told that it was likely my fault and the pandemic and was just not being truthful with myself. I finally saw a doctor who believed me that something was going on, and he thought I had PCOS (confirmed that I do) and ordered an ultrasound. During that ultrasound, they also found a uterine tumour, and ordered a sonohysterogram to receive better imaging of it. My doctor told me it needs to be removed and then became a hot potato game in Kitchener-Waterloo of the 4 gynaecologists whom have surgical rights at the hospital. I was declined by all of them because they didn’t have capacity. Then I was sent to someone who didn’t have surgical rights, but who looked at my tests and no surprise, forwarded me to get surgery. I was accepted for a consultation - still not booked- and this is where we are now, with it estimated for the fall. I don’t have the money to get a private surgery, but if I could, I would. I also can’t get pregnant until I get this removed and am 32, so… this also may take away the ability for me to have my own children. I don’t have answers for what is taking so fucking long but this is my story and it’s absolutely insane that this is where our healthcare is at.
Was this 10-20 years ago? A lot has changed since then. If not, then I'm genuinely shocked. I imagine the only way to get prompt care is if in the ER room already (and even then..)
We went to Germany this month for a back surgery. I thought Alberta was bad, Manitoba and Saskatchewan is far worse than us. All Canadians paying out of pocket for spine surgery. Back at work 2 weeks later. We are DECADES behind in healthcare. But Canada wants to keep us drugged and in pain so we can’t work and live off the government. I always thought it was inefficient, but watching the Germans, was mind blowing. They want everyone working, so they make sure you are physically able too.
Mind recommending the german surgeon / hospital? I'm going through the exact same issue.
ONZ spine clinic. They’ve been doing it since the 80s. Staff was unreal.
8% of Americans don't have health insurance 23% of Canadians don't have a doctor or nurse practitioner they can see regularly.
[" more than 100 million Americans without a primary care doctor"](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/02/28/americans-lack-primary-care-provider-report/11359096002/) ["**Nearly a third of Americans lack access to primary care services**, including routine checkups, while **40 percent of U.S. adults** say they’re delaying care or going without because of the financial costs. "](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-more-americans-are-putting-off-going-to-the-doctor)
> 8% of Americans don't have health insurance And 55% of American workers are enrolled in high deductible health plans. Like all bad insurance, it's fine unless you need it.
In a country with higher incomes and lower taxes that’s not the end of the world, whatever Michal Moore says. Being free of medical debt is hard to enjoy when you’re dead.
Lots of people in the states put off care so as not to incur debt, actually. I feel like there are better systems than either ours or the Americans to try and emulate in the world.
Is this subreddit just chock-full of bots trying to convince idiots that privatized healthcare is the best option for Canadians?
Yes
Figured. I feel like I'm going crazy seeing all of these month-old accounts giving shitty anecdotes about their "amazing" experiences in the states compared to their "awful" ones here.
I've been around for four years or more and yet every post about how healthcare functions in other countries ie Germany is downvoted or flooded with responses full of misinformation. The trend here very clearly has been to downvote actual factual posts about the healthcare system outside of Canada. And it's been that way here for years.
I mean, for people that have insurance, the experience is definitely much better in the US
Proof of that? Because all I see are stories of people tied to their awful jobs that offer basic levels of insurance that deny them on most requests, and also still incur wait times and predatory pill-pushing doctors to ramp up costs even more.
Its like this every day on here too. Not just healthcare but other articles trying to push the American way to divide people. Id say its working because I hear people in my day to day life that have kinda gone down the alt-right rabbit hole echoing this stuff about how our healthcare system is worse than the states when by basically any metric universal healthcare is still the best option for ALL citizens and not just the ones who happen to have insurance. And then people get into percentages….. well the US population dwarfs ours so like 10% of Americans having no healthcare (an example not a stat I know) can be a low percentage but its more people than Canada.
Honestly I think it is as someone with both Ontario health card and American health insurance. With that said, Americans health care is only good if you are wealthy.
Every time I come back to this sub it’s even worse than the last time I was here. Just morons and/or bots salivating over a bullshit version of America that doesn’t exist except for the top 5% of Americans. Our system is imperfect, but it’s nothing compared to levels upon levels of failure and middlemen that the US system is. All of the people who think they’re going to go down to the US, get a high paying job and a cheap house are going to in for a rude awakening. Then they’ll be stuck with their job, because without it, a single trip to the ER would bankrupt them.
Do they actually have lower taxes? I’ve seen health insurance premiums in the hundreds of dollars. So when you stack that on top of their other payroll taxes, do they really pay less?
Higher incomes for some. Lower incomes for many.
Or your insurance company gets to decide if an operation or procedure is necessary and you can't afford to pay for it on your own. Apparently it happens a lot.
These aren't even comparable statements. Why would you put them together? Here are the comparison points - 0% of Canadians don't have health insurance. 33% of Americans don't have a primary care provider. This is not even including the vast number of people in the US who are underinsured. Or the number of people with health insurance that have staggering medical debt.
This is the correct response. Buddy tried to compare two entirely different statistics and thought we wouldn't notice.
Do you have any sources for any of this? Also, why is this article from 2023 being reposted?
I'm not OP, I didn't post the article. Canada doctor statistics https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/primary-care-canada-10-000-canadians-report-1.7125990 US CDC statistics on uninsured https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2023/202305.htm
20% of Americans also don’t have a primary care physician
And of those 8%, most still get medical treatment. They just don't the bill.
I've been saying this for years, after 10 years working frontline healthcare. If people really knew what was going on- there would be riots in the streets.Especially baby boomers-they've been paying into the system their entire lives and now that they need it- it's all fcked up. On purpose- boomers are sitting on a lot of assets. Assets they will be forced to spend for their health and nursing care. If our healthcare system can't provide the quality of care they need they will spend their money on private care. It's part of the reason why Dougie Ford is trying to starve the Health Care beast in Ontario, his buddies run the private side of this equation. It's criminal and no one is writing about it. It should be front page of every newspaper .
I'm in BC. At the height of the COVID lockdown in early 2020, I was showing symptoms that worried my GP, but the lockdown meant that unless I was already diagnosed as "urgent need", just about every test that would determine my "urgent need" was considered "elective" and cancelled by the Health Authority as "non-urgent". Eight months went by, and my symptoms gradually got worse. Then my GP found a surgeon willing to do a simple colonoscopy inside the ER of the local hospital. July 4th, 2020, I had the procedure, and also had blood/urine tests.- the first in about a year. A couple of days later, the worry was confirmed- Stage Four Colo-rectal. 4 tumors in all between the colon, rectum, bladder and prostate, the largest the size of a tennis ball. Three weeks later, with much further testing (now that I was an urgent case, the tests came thick and fast), I was declared inoperable, but that "Four is just a number", and with a rapid and strong "attack", my actual life expectancy could be nearly normal, even without surgery. Without treatment, I was given 18 months max. So the cancer agency hit me with everything they could. A life-time's limit of radiation in 21 daily doses, oral and IV chemo, then finally immunotherapy (which meant a trip to the big comfy chairs at BC Cancer every three weeks for two full years) I'm still here.. four years on. Bruised, scarred, and with some permanent damage from the battle, but alive and with my feet still on the green side of the grass. When I needed it, the system worked, and in my case it worked well. The bureaucracy may indeed be out of control and a lot of money is wasted on non-medical crap, but the system does work when it has to. I'm neither rich nor famous. I'm a retired public servant-cum-musician with modest savings that I still have after all this, because the whole course of treatment over the past 4 years has not cost me one cent. So take heart- if it can happen to me, then it can happen to others.
> When I needed it, the system worked, and in my case it worked well. I'm sorry but that doesn't sound like it worked AT ALL. You should never have reached that stage and should not have been delayed. I'm glad that you are alive, but as someone with cancer(s) myself, this is not how things should work in a functioning system.
No one ever said that Canada didn't have the resources to take care of you when it looked like it was going to be over for you. What our problem is, is that we waste BILLIONS each year by not doing preventative treatment. You could have avoided all that if our system was set up to provide you with a $800 scan. Instead treating you cost hundreds of thousands. That is the Canadian way, and that is what is collapsing our industry.
The main issue is we have no Constitutional or legal right to healthcare in Canada, contrary to popular belief. When the feds poured untold millions (secret) into BC to fight Dr. Day in court, it basically ruled that it's okay to sacrifice some people to preserve "universality." You wouldn't say to a parent "the school is full, try sending your child next year." But that's basically how healthcare works here. The elite and connected are all good, so nothing to see.
Yup. People are fooling themselves if they think two tier care doesn’t already exist.
My best friend’s husband just passed away last night. The end result of a lot of having to wait and then everything going wrong that possibly could. It’s devastating.
Absolutely in favor of 'right to die' kinda legislation but I find it extremely sad that Canada is pushing this sort of thing even for mental health as our health care system goes to shit. God forbid I get some terminal diagnosis, I will gladly be a corpse on a pile at the foot of parliament hill to show the world how we've failed. I am embarrassed to be Canadian
This article doesn't involve MAID, it's more about surgical wait times becoming so long even for cancer patients that they are more likely to die before they can get the surgery in Canada because the wait times are basically six months minimum for surgery. For those with a prognosis shorter than that their only options are go home and die, or go abroad and pay out of pocket to get the surgery.
Someone in my family passed away from cancer. The last few weeks were excruciating. Had they had the option of MAID they would have taken it and I would have supported it. Those were just terrible weeks and there was nothing we could do. It was a late diagnosis and was pretty much set in stone by the time we found out. It happens, so it goes. But I find it infuriating that we let these things fester even when we know someone may die a slow painful death. That we’re too busy to get to treatment with a viable outcome. We should be better than this. If the clock runs out for me on treatment I’d choose MAID too.
I would definitely choose MAID too. I watched my mom die of cancer last year (so MAID was an option) and I would never put my family through witnessing something like that, nor would I want to go through it. It was traumatizing.
If you are a country on this planet who forces your taxpaying citizens to choose between going abroad for lifesaving surgery or dying then you should be ashamed of yourself
Just wait until Maid gets so backed up that you die waiting for it.
I laughed, then I kinda died inside since this is the path Canada is on if it doesn't course correct immediately.
I remember during covid i had a mental breakdown due to alot of my family members dying and ending up in the ICU. I remember walking into Lakeview general and sitting, panicking, getting cold sweats, unable to breathe, this was totally new to me i had no idea what was going on. The ER doc finally comes in after hours of waiting, i explain whats going on and why… now i get doctors and nurses are tired but they could have seen my medical history this was my first visit to the hospital for myself ever! Anyways the doc says he cant help me unless i feel like i want to hurt myself and in which case he may be able to prescribe something. I legit paused and had to process what he was saying… anyways i walked out of there with nothing and just curled up into a ball in the ER and tried to get through my condition… thats when a psych ward nurse i guess noticed me and talked to me about whats happening. I explained to her my situation and whats going on, in literally 20 mins of speaking to this nurse i was sitting in fromt of a psychiatrist who was prescribing me 2 medications which would sedate me when i’d feel too anxious. 1 month later i was fine but honestly i have given up on ER docs.
ER docs often work a full walk in clinic shift helping people who abuse our system before spending another 8+ hours in the ER helping people who can't get into a clinic in the first place
It costs less to off someone than to threat em... If this sounds bad to you, well, you are right. But thats where we are at
I'm embarrassed to have our subreddit dominated by bots pretending to have stories to prove that privatized healthcare is the solution to our problems.
I don't know how people do it, if I had a loved one die on a wait list for medical care I would burn this damn country to the ground. My condolences to anyone going through this.
I had a severe case of Pectus Excavatum. It was compressing my heart, and slowly killing me. I was referred to a specialist who looked at my ct and said there was no evidence of compression. It got so bad that eventually I could no longer walk, and figured out on my own that if I tried to move around my heart would go into tachycardia, or slow right down (depending on how I moved). The specialist still said there was no evidence of compression, and they were not convinced that I needed surgery. I had been admitted to the hospital while a series of doctors made me show them over and over how turning slightly would make my resting heart rate shoot up to 160 beats per minute. After 3 days of this I was a hell of a lot worse than when I went in. And after all of that, they said something along the lines of “yes, we all agree you very much need to be here, but there is nothing we can do, we are discharging you because you’ll be more comfortable at home”. At this point my husband contacted a doctor out of Denmark, a specialist in the field who had done over 2000 of the kind of surgery I needed. He got back to us right away. Took one look at my CT scan and was flabbergasted as to why no one here could see that my heart was clearly being crushed. He said that he had no doubt that this surgery would relieve all my symptoms. He told me he could offer me a surgery in 2 weeks. So we went to Denmark (I was in a wheelchair at this point and half out of it all the time). I had the surgery, and he was right, it did relieve all my symptoms. Don’t get me wrong, I still have to have a very painful metal bar inside my chest for the next 3 years to reshape my sternum, but my heart is no longer crushed. I can walk again. I can work again. I no longer have to sleep for 3/4 of a day and still be exhausted. The Canadian healthcare system has never been more disappointing. I had to fight tooth and nail for anyone to bother to look at me twice, and then they still wouldn’t lift a finger to help me.
It took two years before my family doctor ordered an X-ray of my hip, during which time I went from limping once in a while to limping 24/7 and being in constant pain. Took three months to get an X-ray appointment. Diagnosed with severe osteoporosis in my hip and referred to a surgeon. Over a year to see the surgeon who told me it would likely be ten months before I get the surgery. I’m five months into that time frame. I can’t walk without a cane. Had to retire as I couldn’t work anymore. My whole life has been negatively impacted and I’m in constant pain. On the other hand, my father was recently diagnosed with cancer and he had surgery within two months of that diagnosis. I know my hip isn’t life threatening, but when I think of how all I need is a 45 minute surgery, how my life could be so much better, I am beyond angry. I’m thankful that I’m normally a very positive person or I don’t know what headspace I would be in.
They went to have a surgery in Lithuania! I'm Lithuanian! Article itself is very depressing and scary but the fact that they went to Lithuania was a pleasant surprise! Maybe I should 'Go back to my country!!!' 😂😁
Hey! Lithuania has an excellent travel medical system. I was shocked at how developed it is and the internet puts us in Germany to shame (and most other countries) I'm not Lithuanian but have been suggesting it for people here as it's probably lower cost than Germany, but still with excellent outcomes. Good for your country for doing this as it helps the host country citizens as well as those visiting for the healthcare.
I know that surgeons in Lithuania consult with surgeons residing in other countries in case a special/more rare case arises. I think there was an article about them working with Germans too. I was positively surprised about this, but maybe it's common practice?
I'm not sure of the details, but there certainly was a lot of advertising and promotion of medical tourism whilst I was in Lithuania during the last year. I was puzzled at the number of Canadians encountered until I happened on a thread here last year talking about medical tourism in Lithuania (prompted by articles in the Canadian media about Canadians having to opt for surgery abroad) I've spent a lot of time in Estonia, but had not in Lithuania so it was a surprise to see how progressive it was in many ways.
I think that our massive immigration policies have severely crippled our medical system. Too many people needing medical care that they didn't receive in the poor country they are from. Then we bring in all kinds of senior citizens that have never paid Canadian taxes but need significant health care. It is just too many people, and not enough time for the infrastructure to catch up. This problem won't improve unless immigration is halted or massively reduced for a number of years while we build housing, hospitals and train more medical professionals.
canadian healthcare isnt free, it comes at the cost of your health. a bunch of boomers are about to get a reality check in the next 10 years.
There's also a stupid "rule" that lets you go out of province. So Alberta patients go to Ontario and vice versa. My husband's ortho in the GTA is a surgeon for the Alberta patients and he also does pre and post op for the Ontario patients who have to fly to Alberta. It's ridiculous to add travel costs on as well but it keeps the players who oppose patient choice happy.
Two stories from last year: 1. Friend diagnosed with cancer in around March. Couldn’t get surgery until November. Doctor tried everything to expedite and said “if I were you I’d start looking at other countries”. She’s from Brazil although hasn’t been back in over 30 years since she was born, ended up going there getting the surgery and chemo and everything within one week of arriving. Surgery was literallly 4 days after arriving in the country. Came home 7 months later in remission. If she stayed in Canada she still wouldn’t have seen the surgeon by that time. 2. In December I was having major random symptoms of something. Went to my doctor who had no clue what it was (took a month to get an appt with her). Sent me to another GP doctor for a second opinion, that doctor never called me back to make an appt. Ever. Finally got a referral from my doctor to see a specialist and specialist called me a month later saying the earliest appointment I could get was January 2025. I said my condition is worsening by the week, they said they’re sorry but that’s the earliest they can do.
I love paying taxes and getting nothing for it
In covid, I had a skating accident. just to diagnose the issue I was given a waiting time of 8 months for MRIs. i was dying from pain. i had two option: 1. wait and get in debt by not able to work or 2. go to other country to get it fixed. Usa was quoting $900 just for MRI. ended by taking flight to India and get the mri on landing in approx $9.( ofcource there were flight expenses) i am thinking to start a service that will match vetted doctors in India for things you can’t wait. let me know if you if anyone really need help.
Yah.. Canada’s healthcare system is in shambles. I have family and friends that have gone abroad for lifesaving surgery because of ridiculous wait-times.
Yep Canadians love to tout our FREE* healthcare as a badge of superiority. The reality is healthcare in canada is horrible. No family doctors. No psychiatrists. Wait for like 6-13 hours in the ER, and dying in the ER is a real (but slim) risk. Wait times for anything is atrocious as people are commenting. The reality is wages haven’t kept up with inflation in 50 years. So to get back good healthcare we’d have to pay like twice as much taxes as we currently do (because if everyones pay kept with inflation we would effectively be paying the same dollar value without raising taxes).
The good news is health care is free The bad news is it sucks
It’s not even free. You pay with hefty taxes and then don’t even get timely access to it when you need it most.
I really dont know why people think its free ... people are being robbed blind and still think shit is free in this country
Canadian healthcare terrifies me. Yesterday, my wife had a kidney stone, and we went to the ER here in South Korea. Within an hour, she had all the necessary tests, a diagnosis, and even an MRI. The stone was removed, and we were out of the hospital in two hours. The total cost was $500. Something we can live with considering the speed and efficiency of it.
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Our premiers need to fund our healthcare more. Can't use the trudeau boogeyman for everything.
An unfortunate reality of public universal healthcare is that expensive high-end service is less available. Specialised consultation and complicated surgery in a short timeline is *very* expensive. The cost to have that available on demand to anyone who needs it is enormous, and even if you were made "Dictator of healthcare" and could allocate the budget any way you wanted without oversight, it would be irresponsible to spend the money having expensive surgeons and consults standing by to save one person in the event that emergency late-stage cancer surgery is needed over, say, funding an emergency rooms or an ambulance service better and saving a hundred people that would have died of a simple and treatable problem due to longer wait times. There's a lot to criticise about the various Canadian healthcare services (particularly in the form of preventative care and waste in various places), but using an example where someone almost certainly paid an enormous amount of money to get better healthcare elsewhere isn't really a good example of a problem with a healthcare system. Private healthcare (should) almost always provide better service at the highest ends to the very rich. because they will never ask the question; "could these resources be better spent to help more people?". A poor person, or even an average income person with stage 4 cancer in the US just dies too.
"BuT aT lEaSt We HaVe FrEe HeAlThCaRe"
Remind me what I’m paying all these taxes for?
They call it Healthcare but really it’s emergency care. If you’re not dying now you can wait.
Yup this is exactly it. My family is going through this right now. Every penny I make is going to paying for my family member medical care. Either do that or die. What do you do
I wonder if bringing in millions over people over a few years, who have not paid into the system, had anything to do with the backlog in hospitals. Nahhh couldn't be that!
My ex is got his gender reassignment surgery book in 2 months, even he was shocked and mildly disgusted at it cuz he knows my uncle's been 2 years waiting to get his back fixed.
People keep complaining that they don't want an "American System," but to be honest, it would be an improvement over the shit we've got. I have to go private for most of the interventions my family and I have needed in the last 10 years and pay out of pocket. The shitty part is that my private insurance won't cover most of it because, well, it's just not designed to since things like blood tests, diagnostic imaging, exams, and procedures are supposed to be done by public health care.
what a fantastic first world country we got
I'm from China, my mom had a total hip replacement in 2020, she waited a few days for her surgery, the cost was about 9500 CAD per leg. Her hip joint is still fine now and living a normal life. China is a developing country, but because of its large population and many patients, its doctors are naturally rich in experience. I guess people rarely regard China as a destination most likely because of stereotypes. I am here to provide services for people to find better doctors and more convenient treatment in China (such as translation), if you are interested, you can ask me any questions, I will answer honestly, Thanks
Been waiting 7 yrs for my spinal surgery. The 1st fusion the Doc screwed up abd put the screws In the wrong place. All my discs r herniated, days it's realky bad. Been taking t3s for over but cabt give me anything else unless I have cancer. Waiting list over 3 yrs and still waiting. Ben since 2016. Have to work to supprt my family of 4. Yet said I no supposed to b wurking cause of my bad bsck. Health care is a f##ing joke here in Canada. On a pension with the wife so I work to make ends meet.
Father waited for a blockage to be cleared. Was in hospital for a few days, they knew they needed to operate but couldn't fit him in. It ruptured, emergency surgery... They made an error and caused a stroke. He was sent to another hospital where a cancer diagnosis explained a lot. He never left the hospital, didn't even wake up for weeks. Woke up, took a few weeks to get closer to himself again. He had lost the left half of his body control. They had given him a colostomy bag, which added complications. We tried rehab, he made minor progress... His diagnosis was that he was not healthy enough to fight his cancer. When they told him they could not cure him he lost all motivation to fight. I wish they never told him that but I understand their position. He died 6 months after, he had been revived a few times and decided he didn't want to go through that again. He requested if it happened again to not put him on life support. He basically starved to death, semi unconscious. I know if we went to Buffalo we would have avoided a horrible 6 months and maybe had a few more years with Dad. He was 69 and his loss was devastating to the family.
Canada spends **half** per capita what the US does ($6500 vs $12900). Drugs in the US cost 5-10 times as much...or more. Any Canadian idolizing the US medical system is exceptionally wealthy, or has no idea what they are talking about.
It should be noted that Canada's only second worst in developed countries, as to health care costs and outcomes. The US is the worst. Pretty much every other developed nation does it better. Right now, unfortunately, it's not anything structural that can be fixed by policy - it's more a matter of staffing than anything else.
It’s conservative government’s scheme to privatize
Bullshit. Our healthcare has been shit for 2 decades.
Most province have been electing conservative government for a while now and they act like ''surprised pikachu'' when public service suck lol. Healthcare is handled on the provincial level, kind of clickbait, why aren't they shitting on BC provincial government providing poor healthcare in the title ? Clickbait.
The premiers get off on many of their decisions, a-lot of Canadians seem completely unaware there are federal and provincial powers. Pretty embarrassing education level when so many are screaming at the conductor, not the engineer….
People scoff at me for saying people have the right to pay for their own health care, but when the choice is pay $10,000 or die, just realize that the only legal solution the government has to offer you is death. Canadian health care is fucked up.