Hello, Canadians of Lemmy! Down in the USA there is a lot of conflicting information regarding the efficacy of y’alls healthcare systems. Without revealing my personal bias, I was hoping for some anecdotes or summaries from those whom actually live there.
Honest answer?
If you’ve lived through Canadian HC for a few decades, you’ll notice a few things:
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It’s no where near as good as it was in the past.
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It’s broken now after Covid and the apathetic response to the stress upon the system.
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The conservative governments (mostly provincial) are purposely not putting monies where needed (eg more staff), and underfunding everything in it so the system breaks. This way, their associates can swoop in and take over with “more efficient” and faster HC services - and they can then begin raking in the enormous profit margins seen in the private US system (many of whom are their ‘associates’).
Canadians in most provinces are currently being slow-walked into private, for profit HC.
If you don’t see this. You’re truly blinded by your comforting illusions of what Canada is now, compared to 20-30 years ago. Shit, even 10.
Two-tiered HC coning right up!
In the us it’s a pretty standard strategy for the right wing to underfund or sabotage a program, say government doesn’t work, and then try to privatize it.
It’s not “the right-wing,” it’s the Parties of Capital. Find a government service that turns a profit and people like. Whine about “the deficit,” make “hard-choices,” and underfund it while giving more and more money to your donor’s in the form of carve-outs. Eventually the service starts to suck and people start to hate it, now you can swoop in and privatize it.
A pro-tip to detect this behavior is to see who is talking about the deficit, when that talk comes up it means there are services they want to cut.
The conservative governments (mostly provincial) are purposely not putting monies where needed (eg more staff), and underfunding everything in it so the system breaks.
That’s a major contributing factor to the increased delays and decreased availability.
Those same conservative provincial governments were fighting against the federal government’s offered additional health funding because the feds had the audacity to insist on accountability - that health cate finding be actually used for health and not diverted to other things.
This is happening in Eastern Europe too. Every single point can be applied to any country here
Agreed. UK’s NHS is a poor shadow of its former glory due to Tory/right cuts and desperation to privatise. And just a decade ago the (IMHO awesome) 2012 Olympic opening ceremony showing our thanks and respect… 😭
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My mom was diagnosed with stage 1 cancer this year at her bi-annual check by her doctor. Within 1 month she had a biopsy and surgery to remove the cancerous tumour. She was also put on an experimental treatment to boost her immune system for the couple of weeks she had to wait to get surgery.
She’s now cancer free. Total cost? $0.
I will be very less than nice to anyone who advocates to get rid of our system.
I had a totally benign fatty mass attached to the back of my skull right where it meets my neck that was a minor irritation and made me uncomfortable with short haircuts. I mentioned it to a doctor during a checkup and a month later it was removed. I’m sporting a short haircut today. It cost me pennies on my taxes.
Three weeks ago I had abdominal pain. I went to Emergency and was diagnosed with appendicitis, which had fully ruptured. I was transferred to another hospital in the same city, and had an operation that night. Due to complications I was in hospital for 8 days. The biggest expense during this entire time was the parking fees when my family came to visit. I left with a prescription, and no bill. Yes, some of our wait times are stupid long, but in this case I got what I needed promptly and was not rushed home until I was deemed ready.
Hope you’re doing alright now. Take care :)
Yeah, recovery is a bit slow for my liking, but I’m on the right trajectory. Thanks!
Good to hear! Get well soon :)
My retired mom had cancer a few years back, pretty bad. Surgery, chemo, radiation therapy, hair fell out and wore a wig. The only expense was for parking. Even the wig was provided by a charity adjacent to cancer care. Surgery, one to three weeks in the hospital, treatments spanning over a year, costing a couple hundred dollars in parking fees. No stress about losing her home due to hospital expenses.
I’d take that over what can be had in America any time.
Not perfect, but good. It could be way better if people would stop voting for Con Premiers.
I’m an American ex-pat living as a permanent resident in Canada, and nothing irks me more than listening to idiots from back home arguining with my about the efficacy of our healthcare because “they know a guy who has told them horror stories”. You don’t know shit, and if you really do know someone telling you horror stories about Canadian healthcare, you’re most likely speaking to an overprivledged conservative cunt who lives a lavish life on his oil money whilst somehow convincing himself he has it bad purely because Trudeau is in power.
ER wait times? Sure. But no worse than in the States. And unlike there I don’t have a fuck ton of medical debt, like 5k ER bills for an ultrasound of all things. Fuck me for having inexplicable pain in my abdomen once that never amounted to anything but debt. My mistake.
Exactly. If I don’t feel like I’m dying that day I can wait a few hours. The people in critical condition get seen right away. And if it turns out it was nothing I’m only out some time and maybe a sick day.
You forgot paid sick day. I’ve been listening to a US family doctor doing a podcast. She had to take unpaid leave and vacation to give birth. Here I took 5 weeks paid leave and I’m not the one giving birth.
Sadly I assumed that was implied.
Still using “at least we’re not the USA!” to excuse a dumpster fire of a healthcare system, as we have been for years.
It is important to note that there isn’t a “Canadian” healthcare system, per se. It is largely a provincial jurisdiction. So while Manitoba sees outrageous wait times, hallway medicine, nurse shortages, and people dying in ER waiting rooms because they don’t have a GP, I can’t speak for every province in the country.
Anecdotally, my experience is… OK. I’m lucky to have a family doctor that I’ve had since childhood. That said, I’ve moved multiple times since then, and I haven’t been able to find a doctor in any of my new communities, so if I ever need to see a GP, its an hour drive back to my hometown.
Finding a GP is the worst part of it. My experience with emergencies and a hearing loss has been fantastic. I felt my wait time for emergencies has been reasonable for the symptoms I was having. I had appendicitis as a kid and the health care was as top notch as can be for what’s quite a miserable experience for a kid.
I have a cochlear implant and my experience in getting audiologist appointments has been again perfectly reasonable. Most appointments are just routine and could wait a few months. Once I had broken equipment and was able to get a same day appointment. The province paid for everything while I was a kid (countless tests and multiple hearing aids), paid for the cochlear implant surgery, and covered most of the costs of the processor (not really sure why that part isn’t 100%).
The best part is not a single one of these has cost any money besides time off work and transportation. I’ve seen what some Americans pay. I probably would have been at least 50k in debt if I were an uninsured American.
The GP thing, though… it took me 6 months when I moved to Ontario just to get through waitlists, after taking time to sign up for every clinic waitlist I could. My then-partner later tried out the government run program for finding a GP and was not exactly amused by the fact that it never found a doctor even 3 years later when she gave up on it. She just used walk in clinics and referrals from those.
BC pretty much the same
Any source/article on these “people dying in ER.”? I do feel that Manitoba healthcare has been getting worse in the past few years but even at it’s worse it’s still a great system to be in. The only consideration we have is if it’s convenient for us to access healthcare. We don’t need to worry if we can afford the doctor’s visit. We have affordable medications. Also we don’t need to worry about our families even our extended families because they are taken care of whatever age they are or whatever employment status they have.
I was referring to Brian Sinclair, which was ages ago now, so tbf that is out of date. Hopefully some policy changes have been made since then.
It’s good but aggressively underfunded.
But MUH TAAAXES!
I always wonder if countries with socialized systems would have any complaints at all with the system if it had 50% more funding like the US system does. The US spends 19% of its GDP on healthcare. Canada is 11-12%.
I think it’d be so much better. Though the difficulty with getting to that point is that it’s not merely underfunded because of intertia or something. In a few provinces (particularly my own of Ontario), the conservative government seems to actively want to cut costs and privatize.
What do you think it takes for conservative to be voted out?
Well, if you commies weren’t robbing future potential shareholders of their dividends, you mifht get some good old God Given trickle down scraps. But NO…
I had some abdominal issues that caused me to be buckled over in severe pain most of the day. I was unable to eat anything for days at a time. I was constantly feeling faint and nauseous and vomiting frequently. I did a video appointment with my doctor and he referred me to get an abdominal ultrasound.
It took about a week for the office to call me to schedule the tests. They told me the next available appointment they had was 8 months out.
I wound up getting better on my own after about 6 weeks of hell. I never did find out what was wrong.
BTW I’m not in Canada I’m in the good old US of A where we “Don’t experience delays” and have “Top-Notch Healthcare” thanks to out non socialized systems. I even had good insurance.
The healthcare system in the US is in shambles. It is extremely inefficient and absolutely resistant to any kind of change, because as bad as things are right now, change introduces risk that might make it worse. No matter how slim the chance or how much the benefits outweigh the risks, nobody wants to accept meaningful changes.
If you come to a Canadian ER or urgent care you will have your ultrasound that day or the next day if you don’t seem to bad. No bill for patients. No prior authorization from doctors. No metrics for nurses and staff. Just plain health focus approach.
I live in Canada. I can’t even fathom 8 months for an abdominal ultrasound! Especially with your symptoms at the time!! Glad you got better, that must have been scary for a time…
This is my problems when people bring up wait times… like, have you not encountered those in the USA? Because everyone else has.
Gallstones maybe? Those were hell. Had to get my gallbladder removed.
Put it this way. My wife just got a something equivalent to a heart attack. Ambulance got here in 5 minutes. She spent 3 nights in the hospital, got all the tests, one of Canada’s best docs in the field… it cost $135 for something to do with the ambulance.
They saved her life, she’s seeing a specialist, figured out the meds and prepped if/when it happens again.
Everything was seamless. I don’t know how it could have been better.
Yeah, ambulance rides are often not free. Ditto for meds (although there’s profit caps that keep those reasonable), dentists and eye doctors if you’re an adult, although that’s scheduled to change.
Yeah, it’s weird. The gaps in our healthcare are major problems that I want to see fixed and are great uses of taxes. It’s bizarre that routine eye and teeth health aren’t considered health, despite how much those tie into overall health.
And the prescriptions almost feel like a loophole. You can spend a few days in the hospital undergoing an expensive surgery. Every med you get while in the hospital is free. But the moment you get out of the hospital, any ongoing meds cost money. Prescriptions are apparently a lot cheaper than the US, but they can still get hefty especially for rarer things. Plus what is affordable varies. I can easily afford the approximately $100/mo of prescriptions that I have (I actually pay either zero or $1 per prescription because my work has great insurance – not sure why it’s sometimes $1 and other times free), but for people living paycheque to paycheque, that’s a lot of money and lower pay jobs often have no insurance at all (since it mostly covers dental, vision, prescriptions, and some minor others, medical insurance isn’t viewed as quite so vital by many Canadians – I think that’s allowed quite a lot of companies to feel comfortable not offering anything).
It’s overburdened. We have a huge labour shortages for nurses and doctors as the boomers retire without enough replacements. Finding a regular family doctor takes a long time. When Covid spikes, the hospital staff are run ragged. But they make a nice living helping people, there are worse fields to work in.
When you need medical attention you get it. If you need surgery today, you get surgery today. If you need surgery or a specialist but there’s no rush, you’re on a wait list that can be months or even over a year long.
I’m in Sweden which I think has a very similar situation. Trying to get an appointment is a pain and they always seem to have too much to do. Getting help can drag on for years.
But then you end up in an emergency and suddenly you witness a well-oiled machine where everybody knows their role yet everybody prioritizes the big picture. It follows procedure when possible but it’s always pragmatic.
It is beautiful competence porn, and costs $30 for the patient.
That’s awesome that you can say “well oiled machine” for your healthcare. Canada is like an old manual pick-up truck. It’s not as fast or efficient but it’s reliable.
Can you explain your last sentence. I miss the meaning I think.
“Competence porn” is the satisfaction of seeing skilled people carrying out difficult tasks with great aptitude. I’d say it’s especially satisfying when it’s a group of people collaborating well. When stakes are high, that’s what I typically see the Swedish healthcare doing. And in the end, the patient fee for all of this is $30.
It happened to me once when I came in with a heart problem. Within a couple of hours I had met with specialists, performing EKG at rest and under exertion, multiple other tests, blood samples, and been given a long-term EKG to carry with me for a day. And all I paid was $20 (the standard fee was less then, they’ve raised it to $30 now).
Once they figured out that it wasn’t an emergency, they put me back in the regular low-priority group and it took a six months before they eventually gave me some medication. I’ve since realized on my own that they made the wrong call with the meds - they gave me beta blockers but what I really need is magnesium and vitamin D.
In the US wait-lists for surgeries and specialists are also months long.
Yeah, I think that’s a misconception that many Canadians have about privatization. Some people get the impression that the US must have no wait and that means private healthcare is better. But while they certainly do have less or a wait, it’s not a difference that I think most people would consider worth it if they saw numbers. There’s diminishing returns. The difference between getting a surgery tomorrow or in one month is huge. But getting it in 8 months instead of 10 months isn’t so big.
I’m sure if you have enough money, you could get any kind of healthcare in the US next day, but not for normal people prices.
I think proponents of privatization like to push this misconception because the idea of reduced wait is really the only thing they have going for them and they’re happy to reap the benefits of misconceptions.
Not sure about Canada’s HC system, but I do know lots of older Americans who love to complain and gripe about socialism and socialized medicine. All while being on Medicare and loving it.
Healthcare is provincial here so it varies. I’m in Ontario, the largest province in Canada. Hospital emergency wait rooms have been fairly short in my limited experience. Accessing a doctor is free but getting a family doctor can be difficult. My daughter was delivered at a hospital in a smaller city of 50k. The staff and amenities were great. They had lactation consultants on staff etc. All free to use.
My biggest concern with the healthcare system in Canada is medical staff burnout. I hope they get the staff get the support they need
It should be noted that the burnout this person is talking about is due to conservative governments cutting funding to health care, resulting in less healthcare workers to spread the hours around.
And the hospitals that do have long wait times is also due to conservative government cutting.
It should be noted that burnout is happening in all provinces, not just those with conservative governments.
If you’re rural this is pretty noticeable too. We have a 5-wing hospital where I live, but only the staffing for 2 wings and those wings are quiet and have this weird frozen in time vibe going. Everyone gets sent to the city instead.
It’s definitely underfunded as others have said, but I will also add this - I had the opportunity on Saturday this past weekend to spend some time in the local emergency room due to a sports related injury. I got X-rays and a CT scan done and saw a Dr. And the cost to me personally was about 6 hours. The waiting was a bit long but I brought a book and some snacks, and everyone was super nice.
