Asklemmy

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.

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.

Well, I wish I didn't have to pay for prescriptions or dental, even if my insurance covers most of it (and there are programs if you have none). Things could be better. Not nearly enough family doctors and wait times can be long if it's not imminently life threatening. But I do get peace of mind knowing that no matter what an unexpected major surgery won't financially hurt me.

All in all I look to the states and am thankful for what I have but we could be doing more.

Im in Newfoundland.

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.

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.

I don't want to give too much personal information but some time ago I went to the ER with symptoms not typical of a person of my age and was fast tracked through triage straight to tests, bloodwork, and scans. I was in the waiting room for maybe 5mins. Only thing I paid for was parking.

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.

Used to be excellent.

Then to many right wing pc corporate rim job loving capitalists got in power and very intentionally ruined the system so they could get their scum sucking pill pushing evil corporate friends to swoop in and save us with their private health care work.

Create a problem and then offer a paid solution to it.

I hope Ford and his crack smoking criminal croonies get the guillotine when the revolution comes.

Excellent. Really, I go into the doctor when I need and get the treatment I need. Same story when I need emergency care.

If you need a specialist or something there can be a long wait, though. That has more to do with just hiring, I think, since all the GPs come from some other country and specialists are more likely to be local.

If you have a family doctor it's great. It's also great for emergencies. The non-emergency pipelines often get clogged since not everywhere has adequate staff. Triaging happens. But I've rarely had a serious wait. And the hospitals have fixed my loved once numerous times, and I'm grateful to them, and glad we accrued no debt.

It can take a long time to get anything done. It's free, but it ain't fast.

I waited 6 months for an MRI, finally paid for it myself after the 3rd postponement. That gave enough evidence for a spinal fusion that took another year.

I've started to grow disillusioned. I think a lot of it has to do with the amount of resources used for every sniffle and booboo. Gods help you if you try to go to an Emergency Room. Even dripping blood, I've waited hours without so much as a paper towel offered.

I've had an elective sinus surgery, a second (emergency) sinus surgery, an overnight hospital stay, a blood transfusion, an ambulance ride, different scans, a cast, crutches, a bunch of specialist follow-ups, physiotherapy, family doctor appoitments, and some drug prescriptions. Wow that sounds like a lot but it was just two separate incidents (I'll let you guess).

I did have to buy the crutches at $24, and while I'm still waiting for the ambulance bill I'll only be charged $40. Drug prescriptions aren't free for everyone, but my province has a program where they cover a portion depending on your income (free if you're low income or hit a drug-expense maximum for that year) which I benefited from when I was unemployed. Physiotherapy also isn't free, but I'm getting that covered through my workplace benefits. Other than those minor costs there's been nothing, which is crazy for me. I'm so thankful I'm not being buried under a mountain of debt, especially as one of the incidents happened when I was unemployed.

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.