Are you Canadian? I ask because I’ve never met someone from a Western country with free healthcare who wishes they had our healthcare system.
I lived in Australia for five years and when I came home to the USA, I realized that most people here in America are indoctrinated to believe our system (for anything not just healthcare) is better than everyone else’s when it just isn’t true
This. Whenever I hear somebody defending the US healthcare system (or criticizing another country's healthcare plan), my immediate questions are:
1. Where are you from?
2. Have you actually LIVED in another country and thus have some personal experience with other systems?
For the record, I lived in Taiwan for years and was enrolled in the NHI (National Health Insurance) and received far better care including surgical procedures than I ever did in the states even with a PPO.
Yep. Costs for healthcare in other countries have a basis in reality. Here it’s about charging as much as they can get away with. No competition or transparency.
I worked with a Canadian who moved to the US. Her sister still lived in Canada, and they had the same congenital defect that could lead to a condition that required immediate back surgery.
They both ended up needing the surgery. When the sister in the US visited her doctor, and he noticed the condition, the first thing he asked was if she had eaten breakfast. If she hadn't, he could schedule the surgery for that day, otherwise he'd have to schedule it for the next morning.
When the sister in Canada had the same condition, her doctor scheduled the next available surgery, and prescribed bed rest until then. She could get out of bed to use the bathroom and bathe, but otherwise should be laying down until she had the surgery, because a small mishap could damage her spine and cause permanent paralysis. Despite the severe risk of injury and the extreme side effects of prolonged bed rest, it took six months to get the surgery. If she didn't have support of her family, she wouldn't have been able to afford waiting that long.
When a medical condition impacts your ability to work, traveling to the US to pay cash for the surgery may be cheaper than waiting. There's even an official Canadian web page with advice for traveling outside of Canada to get medical care (https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/health-safety/medical-care-o...) and it expressly lists bullet points of the benefits of doing so.
Counter-anecdote. Wife had a herniated disc. It took six months to get back surgery. This happened in America in 2022. She was in bed the entire time.
It was literally months of going through various hoops to get approval from the insurance company. When the surgery happened, the surgeon billed $80k for about 2.5 hour surgery. Not sure what the insurance company ultimately paid. That wasn't including the anesthesiologist and the facility fees.
If you're dying or in critical condition, you'll get treatment now. There is a problem with non-emergency cases taking a long time to go through the system (especially major and complex procedures, because I've never waited anywhere near 7 months). But the solution to this is to stop the provinces from trying to sabotage public healthcare, then train more doctors and make systematic improvements. Not insert layers of private industry middlemen whose life's calling is converting human suffering into cash at maximum exchange rates. Everyone I know here would gladly take our system over yours.
I was well off, 20 years at Apple, didn’t help me or my wife [1]. I don’t think the NHS is perfect, but I also don’t think they’d intentionally mistreat someone to make more profit. Healthcare in the USA is genuinely fucked, and in some cases, genuinely evil.
Why is this a worthwhile measurement? Some cases can wait without having any negative medical implications, this measurement seems to gloss over this and to me it isn't obvious what the median ought to be. Is it obvious to you?
This was commissioned by the Canadian Medical Association and it is certain that the CMA is cherry picking which results to show on their site. The surveyed doctors are only members of the CMA.
Also this survey dates back to 2023, post pandemic, a time when wait times were longer than usual.
Ok, "most". I think it's a hard sell to go to people that have socialized health care and be like "what if instead of a slightly longer wait, instead you had a system where bureaucrats at insurance providers pull rank over doctors on the treatments you're allowed to receive, and your ability to get healthcare is tied to your employment, and if you get sick you're going to go bankrupt"
Also, the wait time in OUR system sucks too. Try to find a psychiatrist that isn't booked like 3 months in advance. (AI isn't helping with the number of people that need psychiatric services..)
The doom trolling mixed with social media hysteria is creating a huge mental health crisis (not to mention the AI psychosis going on). I was talking to my psychiatrist the other day and she's freaked out. Social media IMO was a huge cause of our current mental health crises, and now AI hysteria is just throwing gasoline on the fire.
I lived in Australia for five years and when I came home to the USA, I realized that most people here in America are indoctrinated to believe our system (for anything not just healthcare) is better than everyone else’s when it just isn’t true