I had a heart attack 14 years ago. I waited in ER for 3 hours with chest pains because was deemed “not urgent”, i.e. I was still conscious. As a result of the delay they couldn’t use plaque busting drugs and unneeded angioplasty and stents. I never had a follow up appointment at any time following the surgery.
The Canadian doctor is correct that people get “urgent” care, i.e. If you come in with severe injuries following a car accident, are in full cardiac arrest at the hospital, convulsions, etc. I have seen people wait hours to get stitched with significant cuts, broken bones, raging temperatures. And don’t even bother coming in with common flu symptoms or you can wait all night to see someone for 60 seconds.
Canadian health care is rationed. Operating rooms stay idle because surgeons are only allowed a few hours each week. It can take years to get a family doctor if you relocate and many rural areas have no doctors within 60 miles.
We also suffer from a lack of specialists. You can wait over a year to see some specialists. An uncle of mine waited off work, on pins and needles for 11 months waiting for a quadruple bypass. The Stalinist purity of single payer does kill people.
I've had one,brief exposure to Canada's health system.Admittedly it doesn't allow a reasonable person to draw any conclusions about the country's system but...
January 2014...driving south toward Montreal and home on a day that started,where I had spent the night,at -40F.I reached a town about an hour south of Val d'Or and wound up rear ending a guy (at about 7MPH...I just barely tapped him) stopped at a light.The airbags deployed and I was slightly injured by the airbag itself.I was brought to a nearby hospital at about 9AM.
Long story short I was told it would be at least 5 hours before I was examined.Given that I assumed that I was not badly hurt (which might not have been the case...I learned later that airbags can cause fairly serious brain injuries),and given that basically nobody there seemed to speak English,I left.
Like I said...mine was just one experience which may,or may not,be typical of healthcare up north.
OK, my boss was away for a year for depression having lost his baby in delivery. Apparently a student doctor reviewed his wife’s condition and said she was NOT in labor, when in fact she was. When he called much later the student’s school they said he had no authorization to make a call like that without a supervisor present. Long story short, with the doctors and hospital coldly ignoring the wife’s concerns and pain, the baby lost too much oxygen and was born brain dead.
Now while I don’t like the wild west of personal injury law in the US, in Canada you are shit out of luck. They spoke to lawyers who said the baby had no economic value (like a working adult would) so there could be no compensation on that front. At best, after spending thousands of dollars on legal fees they were advised the best they could hope for in compensation would be $3000.
The moral to this story is the state decides your health and if they royally screw it up, it is next to impossible to hold them to account.