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.
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TIL US citizens have to pay for their COVID vaccines… wtf.
Southern Michigan here. There may have been places charging for them, but they were readily available from lots of places for free. In our area county health departments, local pharmacies, and most hospitals were all doing free vaccines and boosters.
It was free in the US, that was a policy decision because of the whole issue and some people wouldn’t be able to afford it. But at some point boosters are not free afaik.
The latest ones coming out by the end of the month are no longer free if you have insurance.
Out of curiosity, do annual flu vaccines cost money in the US?
In Canada, the way those work is you just go to any pharmacy or most doctors offices. They’ll take info from your health card, give you the shot (usually no wait, maybe 30 min at most if it’s unusually busy), ask you to stick around for 15 minutes and then you can leave. No cost all and super convenient.
You’re asking the wrong guy, I’m Canadian. There’s an askanamerican sub.
New ones are $100-$200 dollars where I’m at. This winter could be a rough one.
Insurance plans will almost always cover it. If you do not have insurance, you are probably going to pay for it yourself now.
How much did they ask for if you didn’t have insurance?
There are about 2 million people in the US that don’t have insurance.
God I wish the number of uninsured was that low. It is about 8% of Americans or over 26 million Americans:
There is a CDC program to get it for free but that extra barrier will likely mean that people simply do not get the vaccine. Otherwise uninsured people will likely spend $120-130 per shot.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-19-shots-free-insurance/story?id=103167181
The vaccine likely costs Moderna and Pfizer a tenth of that. The US paid for Moderna’s research and increased production capacity. In return Moderna sold the government vaccines at a higher profit than they did for the EU.
A lot of times and places they’re free. But yeah, WTF.
I didn’t here in Texas.
As a Canadian living in the USA… the efficiency of the US healthcare system in comparison to Canada’s is INCREDIBLY overstated. From my experience it has been no more efficient, but a HELL of a lot more expensive and insanely depressing.
Same. The paperwork alone is enormous, and there’s always a lingering dread of “What if my insurance doesn’t cover this somehow?”
It consumes so much time and is so stressful. This healthcare system is an embarrassment and I cannot believe there are people who advocate for this.
What if they use the wrong billing code? What if part of their automation to increase efficiency means being charged for work that was never done? What if they send testing out to a place that is our is network? What is the hospital is in network but the fucking emergency room is not?
Before the ACA you could add: what if I hit my lifetime maximum coverage and what if they consider my condition to be pre-existing?
What if the insurance just aggressively “makes errors” to delay payment?
Have we mentioned we have 12 month maternity leave?
I’ve literally never heard anyone state that the US healthcare system is more efficient than Canada’s, let alone overstate it.
Generally people in the US fear monger about wait times in Canada as if they are awesome here in the US. They might be better here in the US for a lot of things but we also pay 50% more.
In any case where the wait times aren’t extreme in the U.S., you also have to consider the large number of people who don’t even have the opportunity to wait.
Wait times are reduced when people can’t afford to get on the waiting list.
If they want to fairly compare wait times, they need to include in average the infinite wait times for the people who are left out of the system entirely.
Based on the responses in this thread we pay infinity percent more. There’s a lot of $0.00 stories here.
Almost like the capital owners are the ones paying…
I mean the total cost. Yes you do not pay at the time of service but you still pay for it in the form of taxes. Canada spends about 12% of its GDP on healthcare. The US spends about 19%.
I don’t particularly pay for it in taxes.
I personally, make substantially less than our highest tax bracket of $578.126.00 per year, and I make plenty.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-brackets
I’m not personally worried about the taxes I’m paying for healthcare.
I’m worried about being financially ruined (myself and my children) by a health event.
1 in 4 of U.S. adults carries medical debt. One in four. Those are lousy roulette odds with a loaded barrel to the head. It makes some of us think harder about doing risky activities like driving a car to work. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/who-had-medical-debt-in-united-states.html
Personally, I have no sympathy for those making over $578.126.00 per year. Let them pay a lot more, if that’s really necessary (it’s not, but if it is, let them). Hell, I’ll gladly pay more to eliminate the risk of being ruined, if it’s really necessary (it’s not).
And no, as a relatively well off knowledge worker my private insurance does not eliminate the risks. One head injury could:
- give me permanent ongoing medical expenses
- take away both my ability to work (where I get my health insurance that pays my medical expenses
- drastically lower my chances of winning a lawsuit (or even choosing the right representation) against a ln insurance company that doesn’t feel my health merits their expense column.
This isn’t a terrible system for rich people with steady jobs. But none of us are rich people with steady jobs 100% of the time.
Preaching to the choir, my friend. I think anyone who prefers the American system is either fucking nuts or they are profiting off of it. The US pays 50% more overall to come out worse in most metrics. And you are correct that the additional costs fall on the working class. My healthcare costs were about 19% of my income when my wife and I were in the top 10% of households incomes. Lower income households spend more than that 19% here in the US. The ones in the top 5% he up spend only a small percentage of their incomes on healthcare costs. That is extremely fucked.
This is a huge difference. Plus, even if you do end up paying a similar amount in Canada because you’re very well off (boo-hoo), you also don’t have to deal with the US insurance companies that cannot even accurately tell you which facilities are in network or whatever. It’s just so much simpler and the mental burden of dealing with health care is much less in Canada. You don’t have to worry about massive surprise bills or insurance not covering treatment you receive… It’s just not an issue.
Their point was addressing the “$0.00” you quoted. If you’re in Canada, and you pay taxes, some of your taxes go toward the healthcare that everyone benefits from, even if you didn’t have to pay anything out of pocket when receiving services. So even if you indirectly pay $0.01 in healthcare taxes, then it would not come out to “infinity percent more”.
Lol. Fair enough.
The difference is about 50$ to 50 000$, so more like 100 000% more.
I was more talking about how what percentage of each country’s GDP goes towards healthcare. The US, despite having fewer regulations and supposedly being a more efficient private solution, spends 19% of its GDP on healthcare compared to 12% in Canada. Somehow Republicans are under the delusion that less regulation and more privatization will make it cheaper in the US despite healthcare companies fully admitting that the opposite is true.
Also a Canadian living in the US, and I would tend to disagree. In major US cities, with good health insurance, there are plenty of PCPs, and availability of specialists.
For instance, I had a ganglion cyst that I went to see my PCP for. We decided to give it a couple weeks to see if it would go away by itself. It didn’t, so I messaged him, and was scheduled to see an orthopedic surgeon (probably overkill) within 3 days to have it looked at and drained. Total cost: $0 for PCP; $40 co-pay for the specialist.
Meanwhile, my father in Nova Scotia waited close to a year for a knee replacement surgeon consult and is now waiting for surgery slot, which is expected to be another 6-9 months, despite being in significant pain. That just would not happen in the US.
There are many problems for sure, and I don’t have a universal measure for efficiency, but anecdotally, in my experience, there is just way less waiting in many parts of the US. I also acknowledge how privileged I am to have good insurance, resources to not worry about large out of pocket maxes in an emergency, and to live in a city with some of the best hospital networks in the country.
In my experience the wait times issue has been similar between Canada and the US to see specialists, though admittedly I haven’t had to schedule a major surgery in either place. I will admit that there’s some really nice facilities in the US and stuff too (and some REALLY not so nice facilities… Canadian facilities were consistently good across the board in my experience), but it’s hard to really appreciate them in my experience because it’s really shitty to be worrying about the cost of treatment / dealing with insurance and it also sucks to think about how weirdly exclusive it can be and how many people cannot afford it here. Frankly the insurance and cost issues are huge in my opinion and it makes it kind of weird to talk about because it means almost everybody has different experiences with the US health care system, especially when many Americans think it’s fine that they spend a fortune on insurance because they’ve never really known anything different.
I agree. I think both system have significant flaws, and that is coming from someone for whom the US healthcare system benefits the most (great health insurance, mid-30s, healthy, well-off, very capable of navigating complicated paperwork, and access to some of the best hospitals). I can’t imagine being a lower income, lower educated, aging person with chronic health problems, in a rural flyover state with limited community hospitals. Night and day difference.
On the other hand, some 20% of the total population of Nova Scotia is currently active on the waiting list to get a PCP. You don’t like your PCP? Too bad. You want to get a second opinion? Too bad. Your PCP retires/moves/closes their practice? Too bad. They have tried to plug the gap with allowing pharmacists to prescribe certain meds, and expanding PA/NPs. This is probably better than the alternative of no doctors, but its probably a net negative on the system as a whole compared to properly staffing with physicians.
Overall, it seems like chronic underfunding, and underpay for doctors has led to situation in Nova Scotia in which preventative care, or really, care for anything non-life threatening, has deteriorated quite meaningfully.
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Honest answer?
If you’ve lived through Canadian HC for a few decades, you’ll notice a few things:
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It’s no where near as good as it was in the past.
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It’s broken now after Covid and the apathetic response to the stress upon the system.
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The conservative governments (mostly provincial) are purposely not putting monies where needed (eg more staff), and underfunding everything in it so the system breaks. This way, their associates can swoop in and take over with “more efficient” and faster HC services - and they can then begin raking in the enormous profit margins seen in the private US system (many of whom are their ‘associates’).
Canadians in most provinces are currently being slow-walked into private, for profit HC.
If you don’t see this. You’re truly blinded by your comforting illusions of what Canada is now, compared to 20-30 years ago. Shit, even 10.
Two-tiered HC coning right up!
In the us it’s a pretty standard strategy for the right wing to underfund or sabotage a program, say government doesn’t work, and then try to privatize it.
It’s not “the right-wing,” it’s the Parties of Capital. Find a government service that turns a profit and people like. Whine about “the deficit,” make “hard-choices,” and underfund it while giving more and more money to your donor’s in the form of carve-outs. Eventually the service starts to suck and people start to hate it, now you can swoop in and privatize it.
A pro-tip to detect this behavior is to see who is talking about the deficit, when that talk comes up it means there are services they want to cut.
The conservative governments (mostly provincial) are purposely not putting monies where needed (eg more staff), and underfunding everything in it so the system breaks.
That’s a major contributing factor to the increased delays and decreased availability.
Those same conservative provincial governments were fighting against the federal government’s offered additional health funding because the feds had the audacity to insist on accountability - that health cate finding be actually used for health and not diverted to other things.
This is happening in Eastern Europe too. Every single point can be applied to any country here
Agreed. UK’s NHS is a poor shadow of its former glory due to Tory/right cuts and desperation to privatise. And just a decade ago the (IMHO awesome) 2012 Olympic opening ceremony showing our thanks and respect… 😭
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Healthcare is provincial here so it varies. I’m in Ontario, the largest province in Canada. Hospital emergency wait rooms have been fairly short in my limited experience. Accessing a doctor is free but getting a family doctor can be difficult. My daughter was delivered at a hospital in a smaller city of 50k. The staff and amenities were great. They had lactation consultants on staff etc. All free to use.
My biggest concern with the healthcare system in Canada is medical staff burnout. I hope they get the staff get the support they need
It should be noted that the burnout this person is talking about is due to conservative governments cutting funding to health care, resulting in less healthcare workers to spread the hours around.
And the hospitals that do have long wait times is also due to conservative government cutting.
If you’re rural this is pretty noticeable too. We have a 5-wing hospital where I live, but only the staffing for 2 wings and those wings are quiet and have this weird frozen in time vibe going. Everyone gets sent to the city instead.
It should be noted that burnout is happening in all provinces, not just those with conservative governments.
I’m an American ex-pat living as a permanent resident in Canada, and nothing irks me more than listening to idiots from back home arguining with my about the efficacy of our healthcare because “they know a guy who has told them horror stories”. You don’t know shit, and if you really do know someone telling you horror stories about Canadian healthcare, you’re most likely speaking to an overprivledged conservative cunt who lives a lavish life on his oil money whilst somehow convincing himself he has it bad purely because Trudeau is in power.
ER wait times? Sure. But no worse than in the States. And unlike there I don’t have a fuck ton of medical debt, like 5k ER bills for an ultrasound of all things. Fuck me for having inexplicable pain in my abdomen once that never amounted to anything but debt. My mistake.
Exactly. If I don’t feel like I’m dying that day I can wait a few hours. The people in critical condition get seen right away. And if it turns out it was nothing I’m only out some time and maybe a sick day.
You forgot paid sick day. I’ve been listening to a US family doctor doing a podcast. She had to take unpaid leave and vacation to give birth. Here I took 5 weeks paid leave and I’m not the one giving birth.
Sadly I assumed that was implied.
My mom was diagnosed with stage 1 cancer this year at her bi-annual check by her doctor. Within 1 month she had a biopsy and surgery to remove the cancerous tumour. She was also put on an experimental treatment to boost her immune system for the couple of weeks she had to wait to get surgery.
She’s now cancer free. Total cost? $0.
I will be very less than nice to anyone who advocates to get rid of our system.
Put it this way. My wife just got a something equivalent to a heart attack. Ambulance got here in 5 minutes. She spent 3 nights in the hospital, got all the tests, one of Canada’s best docs in the field… it cost $135 for something to do with the ambulance.
They saved her life, she’s seeing a specialist, figured out the meds and prepped if/when it happens again.
Everything was seamless. I don’t know how it could have been better.
Add 3 zeroes to that amount and you’ve got the cost of the same ordeal in the US health “care” system
Ah yes, the “US Healthfare System”
Yeah, ambulance rides are often not free. Ditto for meds (although there’s profit caps that keep those reasonable), dentists and eye doctors if you’re an adult, although that’s scheduled to change.
Yeah, it’s weird. The gaps in our healthcare are major problems that I want to see fixed and are great uses of taxes. It’s bizarre that routine eye and teeth health aren’t considered health, despite how much those tie into overall health.
And the prescriptions almost feel like a loophole. You can spend a few days in the hospital undergoing an expensive surgery. Every med you get while in the hospital is free. But the moment you get out of the hospital, any ongoing meds cost money. Prescriptions are apparently a lot cheaper than the US, but they can still get hefty especially for rarer things. Plus what is affordable varies. I can easily afford the approximately $100/mo of prescriptions that I have (I actually pay either zero or $1 per prescription because my work has great insurance – not sure why it’s sometimes $1 and other times free), but for people living paycheque to paycheque, that’s a lot of money and lower pay jobs often have no insurance at all (since it mostly covers dental, vision, prescriptions, and some minor others, medical insurance isn’t viewed as quite so vital by many Canadians – I think that’s allowed quite a lot of companies to feel comfortable not offering anything).
One time I nicked my leg on a camping trip and opened a piddly ~2 inch cut. 911 sent out 2 paramedics on a fully crewed search and rescue night vision boat which took me to the other side of the lake where I was taken by ambulance to the hospital 1hr away. $86 dollars lol.
The thing that some Americans forget is that by saving your life, you get to live on and pay taxes for the system we all enjoy.
I’ve lived in both US and Canada.
In Canada, my mother had cancer stayed in a private room for weeks until she died and we only paid for the phone bill for her room and parking. I didn’t get a bill from the hospital at all. No claims on insurance.
I had a baby in 2021 and again my wife had a private room while she recovered from her C section and my infant was in the NICU for a week. No bill from the hospital, no claims on insurance. Just paid for parking.
My wife who is type 1 diabetic had 100% of her needs covered through the ontario healthcare system.
I hear stories that in Ontario you have to wait for non-urgent care due to Premier Doug Ford not paying nurses enough, but I have not seen this personally.
I had work coverage that provided dental, vision, and drug coverage if needed.
In the US, I’m 100% dependent on work provided benefits AND I have to pay $4k a year for those benefits. Wife went for some routine work done and it was covered by work insurance. In ontario it would have been a no cost thing too, no dealing with insurance. We wouldn’t have waited in Ontario, we didn’t wait here either.
There seem to be waits here for specialists. Haven’t had to go to the hospital for anything yet.
There are waits for specialists here in the US as well. My son had to wait several months to get an appointment with one of his specialists.
It’s overburdened. We have a huge labour shortages for nurses and doctors as the boomers retire without enough replacements. Finding a regular family doctor takes a long time. When Covid spikes, the hospital staff are run ragged. But they make a nice living helping people, there are worse fields to work in.
When you need medical attention you get it. If you need surgery today, you get surgery today. If you need surgery or a specialist but there’s no rush, you’re on a wait list that can be months or even over a year long.
I’m in Sweden which I think has a very similar situation. Trying to get an appointment is a pain and they always seem to have too much to do. Getting help can drag on for years.
But then you end up in an emergency and suddenly you witness a well-oiled machine where everybody knows their role yet everybody prioritizes the big picture. It follows procedure when possible but it’s always pragmatic.
It is beautiful competence porn, and costs $30 for the patient.
That’s awesome that you can say “well oiled machine” for your healthcare. Canada is like an old manual pick-up truck. It’s not as fast or efficient but it’s reliable.
Can you explain your last sentence. I miss the meaning I think.
“Competence porn” is the satisfaction of seeing skilled people carrying out difficult tasks with great aptitude. I’d say it’s especially satisfying when it’s a group of people collaborating well. When stakes are high, that’s what I typically see the Swedish healthcare doing. And in the end, the patient fee for all of this is $30.
It happened to me once when I came in with a heart problem. Within a couple of hours I had met with specialists, performing EKG at rest and under exertion, multiple other tests, blood samples, and been given a long-term EKG to carry with me for a day. And all I paid was $20 (the standard fee was less then, they’ve raised it to $30 now).
Once they figured out that it wasn’t an emergency, they put me back in the regular low-priority group and it took a six months before they eventually gave me some medication. I’ve since realized on my own that they made the wrong call with the meds - they gave me beta blockers but what I really need is magnesium and vitamin D.
In the US wait-lists for surgeries and specialists are also months long.
Yeah, I think that’s a misconception that many Canadians have about privatization. Some people get the impression that the US must have no wait and that means private healthcare is better. But while they certainly do have less or a wait, it’s not a difference that I think most people would consider worth it if they saw numbers. There’s diminishing returns. The difference between getting a surgery tomorrow or in one month is huge. But getting it in 8 months instead of 10 months isn’t so big.
I’m sure if you have enough money, you could get any kind of healthcare in the US next day, but not for normal people prices.
I think proponents of privatization like to push this misconception because the idea of reduced wait is really the only thing they have going for them and they’re happy to reap the benefits of misconceptions.
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.
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.
Hope you’re doing alright now. Take care :)
Yeah, recovery is a bit slow for my liking, but I’m on the right trajectory. Thanks!
Good to hear! Get well soon :)
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.
Not perfect, but good. It could be way better if people would stop voting for Con Premiers.
Honestly, not that great. In Ontario, health care has been heavily affected by Doug Ford’s Bill 124, which capped nurse’s wages at 1% a year for 3 years, causing horribly long wait times and understaffing at hospitals
The healthcare is fantastic. The conservative governments in charge of said healthcare is abysmal and destructive.
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.
BC pretty much the same
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.
I was referring to Brian Sinclair, which was ages ago now, so tbf that is out of date. Hopefully some policy changes have been made since then.
