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.
I’ve lived in both US and Canada.
In Canada, my mother had cancer stayed in a private room for weeks until she died and we only paid for the phone bill for her room and parking. I didn’t get a bill from the hospital at all. No claims on insurance.
I had a baby in 2021 and again my wife had a private room while she recovered from her C section and my infant was in the NICU for a week. No bill from the hospital, no claims on insurance. Just paid for parking.
My wife who is type 1 diabetic had 100% of her needs covered through the ontario healthcare system.
I hear stories that in Ontario you have to wait for non-urgent care due to Premier Doug Ford not paying nurses enough, but I have not seen this personally.
I had work coverage that provided dental, vision, and drug coverage if needed.
In the US, I’m 100% dependent on work provided benefits AND I have to pay $4k a year for those benefits. Wife went for some routine work done and it was covered by work insurance. In ontario it would have been a no cost thing too, no dealing with insurance. We wouldn’t have waited in Ontario, we didn’t wait here either.
There seem to be waits here for specialists. Haven’t had to go to the hospital for anything yet.
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.
As luck would have it, I was travelling in Las Vegas last year when I had sudden abdominal pain. Fortunately, I have travel health insurance from my work, so I went to the hospital. At that time I’d been inundated by how fucking AMAZING American healthcare is over anywhere else in the world.
I was admitted from the ER, spent a night in an overflow bed waiting for OR time, and had my operation and was discharged the following day. Just for fun, I also learned I had COVID during the intake process.
Comparing it to my experience with Canada’s healthcare system, the only difference was I had to wait before being treated for a woman with a giant cart with a computer and papers and other shit to screen for my insurance to be sure I was eligible to receive care. They didn’t want to treat me because my travel insurance was through another network, but they would treat me because this was deemed an emergency surgery.
Apart from that, it was essentially what I see in Canada:
- nursing staffing shortfalls
- poor communication inside the hospital (post-op team hadn’t even been told I had COVID)
- “long” but acceptable wait for an emergency surgery
- standard diagnostics took a couple hours (bloodwork, CT, etc)
Some things were better:
- good parking at the hospital
- building and facilities were clean and seemed new
Some things were poorer:
- I was discharged with a prescription and told to stop at a pharmacy on the way home for painkillers. In Canada they would hand me a bag with the meds already dispensed.
- got a call from collections (in Switzerland?!) six months later asking why I hadn’t paid my bill. It took far too much time to get them to understand they never gave me a bill nor access to one, and just claiming a bunch of $9999.99 expenses against my health insurance (which declined them due to lack of information) was insufficient
The whole experience left me really soured on American healthcare. It was “fine”. I felt like it was free tier healthcare that nobody should be paying out of pocket for. The extra hoops and whistles SOLELY BECAUSE OF MONEY was depressing and awful.
My comparison, we just had a baby (back in Canada). I’m apparently going to have to pay a bill of a couple hundred bucks because we opted for a private room for postpartum care, but I didn’t sign anything and haven’t heard anything yet. I also had to pay for parking for several days, so add another maybe 50 bucks for all that. The only thing I can really complain about is how beat up the furniture in the hospital was, and how old the artwork on the wall was. Oh, and the family room that had 2 VCRs, no tapes, and a stack of DVDs (and no DVD player). Kind of petty stuff.
Tl;dr: they’re the same in my eyes, except one cost $70,000 for 18 hours and the other cost me $500 for 3 days.
I have to mention that even the 500 you spent on your care in Canada is too much. These things should be considered and covered already. Accepting that certain aspects (especially new things) of a hospital stay should cost money is a slippery slope I don’t want to go down.
1000% agreed. While those add-ons I paid for were all “optional”, they do reek of benefits only available to the privileged.
I can live with that, but what I find really egregious is that people get a bill (of $150, but still) if they need an AMBULANCE to take them to a hospital. I’m sure there’s programs in place to help people without a lot of money to get it covered, but the fact it’s been set up this way in the first place stinks.
I can speak to this as I’m just going through it now.
I’m a young male in good health. I started having weird heart palpitations randomly starting last year. Had them four times, but they normally go away after 20ish mins. GP reviewed me, said it seemed fine, but to go in to ER if anything about them changed (ie more frequent, more intense, lasted longer).
Last friday they went on for an hour, so I went in. Entered at 11am.
Was triaged within 15mins, including an ECG. Once they confirmed it wasn’t an active heart attack, I sat in the waiting room for two hours. I then saw a doctor, got a chest X-Ray, and bloodwork taken within 45mins. I proceeded to sit in the room hooked up to the vitals monitor for four hours while they ran my bloodwork, and the ER doc came back. He sent me a requisition for a cardiologist and told me to take aspirin until I saw the specialist.
I saw the Cardiologist on Wednesday, and he’s explained he’s not concerned given my lack of other risk factors. He’s now sent me over for an ultrasound and 36hr halter monitor next Monday. He said unless something weird comes back or he wants another test, he won’t see me again, and I should follow up with my GP 2 weeks after I finish the halter monitor.
So within 3 or 4 weeks I had a full range of tests done, and my biggest expense was $7.50 parking for the 30min cardiologist appointment, which I was actually unironically complaining about to my wife last night.
Honestly, not that great. In Ontario, health care has been heavily affected by Doug Ford’s Bill 124, which capped nurse’s wages at 1% a year for 3 years, causing horribly long wait times and understaffing at hospitals
The healthcare is fantastic. The conservative governments in charge of said healthcare is abysmal and destructive.
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.
Where I am the system is a bit overwhelmed but it sure beats having to go into massive debt or having to have healthcare insurance tied to employment.
It’s there if I need it, and that’s all I need honestly.
You know… this one is really complex.
Nobody feels hesitation to seek the help they need based on funds, but now due to access or wait times.
It wasn’t always like this, in the 2000s it was marvellous, I remember having a medical scare, showed up at the ER, got triaged right into a doctor because it was time sensitive, saw the doc, got an examination, got cleared, and discharged $0.
Now I feel apprehensive about seeing my local clinic for a sprained ankle.
Now you may wonder why? Is the system failing? Well…yes, and no.
In the last decade or so, we’ve seen a strong ultra-right push to “prove” the system is broken and we need to copy the way the US has it (so the politicians friends that own pharma services etc… get lucrative deals from the govt) by sabotaging it directly and saying “look, it’s broken”
One very clear instance, in my province (AB) during the biggest health emergency we’ve seen in our life time (COVID) our health minister made it his life’s mission to piss off the medical community, under funding programs, firing component leaders in health and replacing them with yes men, and ripping up the doctor/nurse contracts.
What we’ve seen is docs and nurses leaving on droves as we doubled down on COVID hardship and squeezed the money out of frontline workers instead of going after the real problem which was lazy/corrupt middle management and supply chain problems.
To make things worse, our lab services was a crown-run (means it’s a govt funded business, which can think bigger because they don’t have to seek profits so hard, just efficient use of government funds) and they cancelled that contract to replace it with a private sector business.
Since this wait times for lab services have multiplied 10x, costs to consumers became a thing (it was free before) and all that government funding has disappeared.
So lose, lose, lose for the People.
So it’s gotten worse, because the people in charge at the government are gifting, and killing it on purpose.
Would I trade it for your system? Not in a heartbeat, never, we just need to solve our fucked up politics and get people who care in power.
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!
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.
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.
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In BC the wait times are longer. But this is a symptom of the underfunding from federal and provincial governments. COVID was tough on the health care systems and they did a lot with what they had. Now should be the time to invest in the system and get it healthy again, but apparently more pipelines are the priority…
But overall I am satisfied for our system. It does not cost taxpayers an arm and a leg to fund it, and an emergency won’t bankrupt someone. If you can get extended coverage such as with an employer then you pay minimal amounts for dental, medications, and paramedical services like physio or massage. From what I hear of the American system, I am shocked that there isn’t some type of bare bones coverage for everyone. Sounds like a third world country from up here…
Not perfect, but good. It could be way better if people would stop voting for Con Premiers.
In my experience it’s okay, but not amazing and slowly getting worse year after year for various reasons. Generally speaking if you have a life-threatening issue (heart failure, cancer, etc), you are taken care of as well as anyone could reasonably expect. But for anything else it can take forever to see a specialist and it’s easy to get lost in the system that always seems to be running in capacity crisis mode. There are other countries that do a better job with the single-payer model, mostly those without provincial fiefdoms that insist on doing everything themselves and reinventing all the wheels for political reasons.
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.
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 :)
I have no experience with healthcare outside of Canada but as a kid I was always taken for routine checkups. As a young adult I don’t do regular checkups but that’s mostly because I’m lazy and finding a doctor who will agree to give you regular checkups can be difficult.
I did have an experience where my vision became blurred and I passed out. Someone called an ambulance for me and I was seen by a doctor as soon as I got to the hospital.
They did some basic tests and decided whatever it was it wasn’t immediately killing me so they referred me to a neurologist. Their office setup some appointments for me over the next week and I had all kinds of tests run. Then I was sent to a heart specialist who scheduled me for a bunch of tests the next week. At the end of it all both specialist decided I was perfectly healthy and I passed out because of an anxiety attack. They recommended I be less stressed. Thanks!
Between the hospital visit, the tests by the neurologist, and the tests by the cardiologist, I paid $45 for the ambulance and got my clean bill of health in about 2 weeks.
