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 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.
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.
Well I can share my experience. I moved to Canada in 2020, I lived in Toronto for a while. In Toronto I was able to get a GP assigned to me fairly quick. I never had to use the services. Around mid of last year I moved to Ottawa for work. I been on the wait-list to get a GP assigned to me.
In the meantime my wife is recently pregnant, and we been sending out contact information to all the local hospitals hoping to get a gynecologist assigned. She is also on the same boat as me with regards to GP, being on a wait-list. As of now we are going to a private clinic for imaging, and so far everything looks good. But yeah I don’t if it could be better, but it would help my anxiety if for her at-least they got the doctor assigned.
You gonna start on walk-in and plead that you need a family doctor and a Obs-Gyne because you are **mo pregnant. Some doctors will take you in specially because she needs pre-natal care. Then it’s easy to get a specialist first meeting.
Sometimes walk-ins will just refer you to Obs-gyne without taking you in as their patient. Another option is doctors would sometimes take families in as their patient even though their practice is full. Most specialist are referral base.
I’ve lived in 4 provinces and one territory. There is a wide gamut of health care since provinces have much more say than the federal government. Alberta has been sone of the most efficient and quickest health care out of the places I’ve lived. Manitoba’s pretty lackluster mostly in time it takes to get anything done, fairly inefficient.
Overall I think we have a pretty solid system. My first child was born via an emergency c section, the most I paid was I think $15 for the parking I believe plus another 100 ish bucks because we wanted a private room. My second was a planned c section due to pregnancy difficulties so again those pesky parking fees jumped up our cost there but didn’t pay for the private room this time . Still got a private room but didn’t pay anything for it.
I’ve been in for everything from x rays to surgery to stitches, and I love being able to walk out of the hospital with nothing more than a wave.
Is it perfect? Hell no, there’s still a lot of room to improve. But hey isn’t that true of everything?
Wait times in the emergency room aren’t too bad. Its very heavily triaged so if you go in with a major emergency you will basically be seen immediately, but if you go in with something minor you might have to wait a few hours, especially if there are any respiratory illnesses going around. Children and elderly patients struggling to breathe take priority over an otherwise healthy adult with a wound that just needs a few stitches.
Getting a family doctor can be difficult. There just aren’t enough to go around.
Seeing a specialist will usually involve a long wait list (a few weeks to a few months depending on what they specialize in), so its best to book an appointment as soon as you can. You may have to travel to St.Johns so there might be some travel expenses. Growing up I had to see an ENT in St.Johns every summer for a checkup, so we just turned the visit into a camping trip.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Leaps and bounds better than the US system (then again, anything is) but I’ve had a number of chronic issues that Canadian doctors couldn’t resolve in a year, went back to Mexico and it was fixed in days.
I tell people Canada is a great place to get cancer or have a heart attack. For chronic illnesses or trying to find family doctors is becoming very difficult. Medical staff is burning out and retiring or moving elsewhere. Things like hip surgeries can see 4 year plus waiting lists and medical costs are increasing significantly for all governments. To a lesser extent, leading edge procedures are not available. The system is seems close to a breaking point from most of the people I know in the medical industry.
I would say it is better than the US model but not by a great deal. If your illness is not immediately life threatening it can be years to get treatment. In that time you can lose hundreds of thousands in wages and many people often are in the same situation as being financial broke regardless.
Lost of wage/job in Canada doesn’t mean loss of healthcare. You have so much protection and subsidies from the government if you really can’t work due to health.
In Canada you have sick benefits and even family sick benefits. Most of the time you don’t need to choose between accessing health and job security.
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.
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 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.
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