Thanks for the information.
I still prefer the American medical system as it once was.
“Where I live (British Columbia) we are billed directly for participation in the plan. The highest monthly premiums for people of middle-income or higher means would be in the order of $121 a month or $1450 a year. You can get reduced premiums tied to lower incomes. “
As an ex-Vancouverite, you forgot one other important thing: if you can’t pay your monthly premiums, you write the BC or provincial govt that you are “poor” and they’ll waive it for you. Plus, they (tax revenue canada) cannot garnish your wages and take away from the bank, unlike here with the IRS.
2nd, never, ever go out without your provincial card. If you don’t have one, you WONT be helped. I’ve witnessed countless times homeless people get kicked out of Vancouver General for not having the BC health card. Here in America, you WILL be helped regardless but in canada, it’s FU, die in the gutter, buddy.
Thanks so very much Peter. This is going into my personal healthcare research file.
Countries like Canada with relatively low minority populations can still pull off a socialized health care system to a degree. Most Canadians must approve because I didn’t see masses of Canadians trying to cross the border to get away from socialized medicine the times I’ve visited The Great White North. But I wonder how they’d like it if they had the amount of parasites we have. There’s about 15-20% of the American population who do little or no work and are basically leeches. And of course, we have millions of illegals who receive health care on the tax-payer dime. Canada’s leech population is probably less than 5%.
Canadian health services has consistently sent people to the US (particularly at the end of the fiscal year) to get treatment. Doctors are too often obtained by lottery in smaller towns and rural provinces.
Over all it is only slightly better than the NHS in Britain
I think a pure fee-for-service system is the best, plus catastrophic insurance for the big stuff. If the government has to be involved it should only be in mandating catastrophic insurance. Our mistake is in getting govt involved in the small stuff.
If we absolutely have to have government health care in order to assuage the consiences of caring liberal types, we should do it along the lines of the French system which allows a free market system to exist alongside the government system.
Screw the anglosphere model where government totally takes over.
And lets say I require a Thorasic Surgeon, how many are there in the province of Ontario and how long would it take before I could go under his knife?
As a side note, many years ago, a close friend of my parents lived in Windsor and was diagnosed as having a tumor on her eye. A biopsy was scheduled for 8 months later.
She chose to come to Detroit and see my BIL who is an oncologist. He was able to schedule her for surgery two days later and they removed the benign tumor which would have destroyed her eye had she waited until the prescribed Canadian appointment..........
Around 1995, my 80 year old mother finally decided to have cataract surgery on her eyes. Once the decision was made, she went to a specialist about 15 miles away and the surgery was scheduled for the following week.
It went perfectly and she was home that night reading the Fox News crawl without so much as glasses. Amazing.
I should add that we live in a very rural area of upstate New York.
At the same time, a friend of mine in Kitchener, Ontario [outside of Toronto -- Canada's largest city] who was also suffering from cataracts, required several months to be seen by a specialist and then was put on a year-long waiting list to have the procedure.
She eventually had the surgery.
We are people of very modest means. Yet, Mom was able to have her cataracts removed with about the same difficulty as a Canadian has to get her blood pressure meds refilled.
I fear we've lost that.
You mentioned your income tax, so how much do you pay in GST and PST?
How is the doctor situation? We lived in BC and Saskatchewan in late 90s...docs were striking because the government wasn’t paying enough to cover their costs. The docs in Prince Albet were from foreign countries and worked on rotation out of country.
Having had the misfortune of accompanying someone into a Canadian Hospital, I can assure you that unless you are practically bleeding to death, you will be waiting hours, and I mean hours, before you get looked at.
You’ll also probably be the only white person in the waiting room. This is the reality of healthcare in Canada, take from these comments what you will.
Hope you’ll jump back in here to reply to these guys’ questions because they are central to the discussion. Also, the point made by another FReeper on dead-beats deserves deeper discussion, along with the demographic/cultural differences.
Thank you very much for your timely and relevant information.
May I ask how many medical advancements -- in terms of technology and treatment -- Canada can claim credit for since the system was introduced in the sixties?
In my estimation, this is one of the major costs of a socialized medical system. It essentially freezes current technology and treatment in place, as there is no longer any incentive to innovate.
Well the Canadian health care system sure works well for...US border cities.
The waits for various labs, specialists, scanning equipment is so long in Ontario that on any day you can drive around Buffalo, NY and look at the various facilities and see many Canadian license plates.
In the Buffalo area alone we have more CAT scan and MRI installations than all of Ontario.
We love our Canadian neighbors but we sure don’t need their rationed health care system.
PFL
Thanks for posting this, Peter.
I have had a few occasions to go to the emergency room over the past number of years, and I can say that the service I received was very good (at hospitals in more than one city). The downside, as was noted by someone above, was that since my injuries were painful (broken bones, torn ligaments) but not in any way life-threatening, I did spend a number of hours in each case unattended. Fortunately, the pain was bearable, and I had brought something to read.
Our system is neither the cure-all (no pun intended) that its most ardent supporters think it is, nor is it the living hell that free-market-medicine proponents mischaracterize it as. We receive excellent medical care, albeit attended by the inefficiencies that any economist will tell you to expect.
Unfortunately, we’ve been conditioned to recoil in horror at the mention of “two-tier” medical care, where the public system and a user-pay system exist side-by-side. I would be all for it; I can’t think of a single moral reason why any Canadian shouldn’t be allowed to buy medical care from private facilities on a cash-and-carry basis. Wouldn’t that just free up resources for the rest of us?