Canadian Non-Healthcare a Guest Post By the Balloonatic

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Canadian Non-Healthcare a Guest Post By the Balloonatic

A recent medical issue in my family brought the problems with Canadian healthcare to my attention again. My younger brother let us know in April that his wife had an appointment with a cardiologist. She has been having issues for years because one of her valves is opening the wrong way so blood going through is moving away from her heart instead of to her heart. On a positive note, she is now scheduled for open heart surgery at the end of June, which makes it seem that the Canadian healthcare system is moving quickly to take care of her – until you find out that she had to wait over 18 months to see that cardiologist. A quick phone call to one of my local cardiology clinics and their average wait time is 4 to 6 weeks.

This isn’t my first personal experience with how broken socialized healthcare is in Canada. This wasn’t something I noticed when I was younger. My only health issue was with migraines and I had no trouble getting into the doctor who did his best to try various alternative treatments, but there weren’t many of those available in the early 80s and I ended up falling into the trap of pain management with codeine causing an addiction with a feedback loop where my body started to produce more migraines to get more codeine. When I finally was able to break out of the cycle by finally quitting cold turkey, I was able to get the help I needed – counseling and trips to the emergency room for pain relief until I could find other ways to manage the pain.

It wasn’t until I came back to Canada in the mid 90s after an absence of almost 4 years while I studied in Australia that the problems of government run healthcare first caught my eye. While in Australia, I made my living as a street performer making balloon animals (yes, that’s where the nickname came from!). This was a great way to earn a good amount of money in a more limited time frame so I kept this up while finishing my BA in Alberta. I worked through various entertainment agencies, managed to get myself an annual gig at a big festival which covered a good portion of my living expenses for the year, and then busked at a local farmer’s market.

It was at the farmer’s market where I made friends with “Mary”, one of the market’s employees. Mary was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. She could only walk with the assistance of two canes/braces on her arms. We got to talking once and she let me know that the biggest issue was with her hips, where the joints had deteriorated. She had gone to several specialists and they let her know that the only option to help her would be to have both of her hips replaced. This doesn’t seem like a big deal sitting in my room in Ohio – hip replacements are fairly common. For Mary, though, this decision wasn’t just between her and her doctor or her insurance. It was up to the healthcare bureaucrats to decide when someone is allowed to have hip surgery. And their decision was that she didn’t qualify because she was too young. If she got hip surgery now, in her mid 20s/early 30s why she would need to have it done again in 30 years. So, better for her to wait until she’s older when she would only need to get it done once. I must say, that was a real eye-opener for me and brought up the problems of healthcare by committee when the focus is on saving taxpayers money and limiting healthcare rather than on putting the focus on treating and healing people.

This came home to me again several years later. In 1999 I was living in Saskatchewan, doing an internship program when I got sick – more sick than I had ever been in my life. I was aching all over, had severe chills and zero energy. It was all I could do to pull a pre-heated meal out of the freezer and microwave it. I finally called someone to take me to the hospital when I started having trouble breathing and began hyperventilating in panic and got admitted to the hospital. I recently found paperwork on this when I was cleaning up my attic and going through my visa applications to find that the doctors had admitted me for panic attacks. I spent a week in the hospital, hooked up to an IV while they had me blow into a plastic tube with a ping pong ball, and I couldn’t make the ball move up. That was the sum of their treatment. Finally, in frustration and desperation, I booked myself out of the hospital. My adopted grandmother sent me a plane ticket to come back to stay with her and her husband. I was so weak when the plane landed that I had to ask for help to depart, and they took me out in a wheelchair. My grandmother later said that she looked at me in the arrivals section of the airport and thought I was going to die. I was lucky, though – I had a great family doctor in Edmonton who saw me right away, got me in for x-rays and discovered that I had had a version of the flu that lead to a type of pneumonia which was viral rather than bacterial. She prescribed the right medications and while it took months, I did recover. This taught me that I couldn’t depend on a medical system or doctors to help me when I need it – I had to push for my own care and proper treatment, because the public system doesn’t want to make the effort to do more than the absolute minimum.

There are many more examples I could provide – my uncle, a quadruple bypass survivor ended up in the emergency department of a hospital again in the 2020s with heart problems. He went in on a Friday and didn’t get to see a cardiologist until the following Monday because the only cardiologist available at the hospital in a town of over 166000 people was on holidays and they had to fly one in from the nations capital to see him. My 87 year old father experienced a similar issue last year, when he went into emergency because he was light-headed and dizzy. He went in at night and it took 8 hours for him to see a doctor because they didn’t have any actual doctors in the emergency department at night – he spent that whole time sitting in the waiting room. At least he is more fortunate than one of his old buddies from work who developed cancer and spent the last three months of his life lying in a hospital room with 12 other men. Or the father of one of my childhood friends who also developed cancer and could not get proper pain management treatment so he chose to use the MAID program instead – which is a whole other blog post. Canada: where they would rather kill you than heal you.

The horror stories abound and are never ending. When I go in for my next annual check up and see my doctor, I will thank him once again for being available even at short notice when my son or I need to see him and for the way he does push me to get preventative care and go for tests to make sure that any health care issues are taken care of and not left to grow worse from lack of care. While yes, I may sometimes have bills that seem much too high (Thanks again, Obama!), I will take those bills over the alternative of a “free” system paid by higher taxes where the focus is on saving money over saving lives.

101 thoughts on “Canadian Non-Healthcare a Guest Post By the Balloonatic”

    1. Yes, I remember in the last decade, I used to get mailings in favor of government-run medical systems that praised the VA system as a good example of socialized medicine. I received at least two such mailings after the intense corruption at the VA became public, and then they stopped. In Catastrophic Care, David Goldhill used the VA system as an example of when government systems are not “inherently incompetent”. Catastrophic Care was painfully interesting because Goldhill for the most part successfully identified the problems with the then-current health “care” system in the United States, and at the end prescribed… more of the same, and harder.

      (I noticed that, for a while at least, praise for the British system also stopped after two high-profile cases of the system keeping children under armed guard to prevent parents from attempting to keep them alive.)

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      1. …

        (blink)

        ….

        I would have slit throats. You can prosecute me later.

        ….

        One more reason I am -so- very glad Trump won his threepeat in 2024, preventing such necessity here. And at the rate he is going, he will set back the marxists by a century.

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        1. “I would have slit throats. You can prosecute me later.“

          –

          Same.

          I remember thinking about my cousin Lisa as I read about those two incidents. Lisa was born late ’60s with spina bifida. Aunt and uncle had to fight to have the doctors even clean her up and let them hold her. Then fight for the initial surgeries she needed to close the open back. Yes, she had numerous surgeries in her 13 years, mostly shunt to drain the fluid from her head that her missing natural processes could not do. Yes, she lost her battle at age 13 in 1980. But she while she lived her life in a wheel chair, she was a bright intelligent child who kept up with her same age classmates. She could stand with braces, but never walked on her own. She is buried between great-uncle and our grandmother in the private family historical cemetery.

          Lisa’s life struggles, and those before her, her parents fighting the medical system, are part of the reason why spina bifida is not an automatic death sentence for infants over the last 40 years.

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        2. It only takes one additional Marxist adminstration to reverse most of the changes or cause war/mass death in current day. This why we can never let them “rule” us again.

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      2. Medicare, whether you are on Medicare Advantage or not, is almost as bad.

        Advocate for yourself. Took a *Kardia device and AFIB episodes to get to a heart doctor. However once I got the referral, didn’t take long to get in to see one. Buy getting the referral to know which expert was needed was a PIA.

        Prior to the AFIB episodes, I’ve complained not only at the “yearly” required medicare appointments, which are a joke (not suppose to talk about actual medical problems), but any reason to be at a medical appointment, and even online portal non-urgent medical questions, of being suddenly exhausted. So exhausted that I have to stop what I’m doing and shut my eyes for 10 or so minutes. Out and about I can power through, usually. But driving I have to pull over somewhere safe until it passes. At home, I don’t bother.

        Now that I have seen a heart specialist, I’m on blood thinners, and on cholesterol medication, those exhaustion episodes have all but stopped, and I can always power through them. Go figure.

        The heart problem is two fold. One the AFIB (that cause is unknown). Second is heart valve. (The two are not related.) Not critical, but will need replacing in < 10 years and is related to cholesterol problem.

        Cholesterol. It has always been “borderline”. The heart doctor put me on the cholesterol medication immediately based on standard tests, then a second pill based on the (never had test) Lipid(A) number. Um my recent test numbers are lower than those “borderline” numbers.

        (*) FWIW GP wasn’t impressed with the Kardia device. Heart doctor was glad I’d gotten it. Downside is you have to realize you are having an episode and use it. So, never catch exactly when an episode starts, nor stops, but can guesstimate if short (half an hour after detection) or long (hours, longest was 8 -ish hours) it went. Not just full AFIB, but PVC (Premature Ventricular Contractions), SVE (Superventricular Ectopy), “undetermined”, and (naturally “normal”), along with two others. All of which I’ve had. Specific episodes can be uploaded to medical portals. As well as sent to Kardia heart specialists (on the $99 advanced yearly cost … if you don’t know what is going on … won’t need that subscription on going) although they don’t provide a whole lot of “extra” information other than verify “yep, need specialist you can go see”.

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        1. I am not a doctor, and I’ve never played one on TV, but you might want to ask about a device called a “watchman.” It doesn’t help with the AFIB, but it’s suppose to prevent clots pooling in dead zones in your atriums and being thrown off to your lungs or brain. My mother had one; she also had ablation to treat her afib; but perhaps your cardiologist has ruled that out.

          (A British doctor implanted my mother’s watchman, btw, here in the USA.)

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          1. Just starting the process. Just 5 weeks out from initial consult. Doctor acknowledged the AFIB, but was more concerned with the heart valve and cholesterol. Just had a two week monitor of heart from Boston Medical (continuous monitoring with ability to “mark” concerning symptoms with device, and note track). Just sent that back Monday. Did have an AFIB incident (shock, didn’t expect that) last Wednesday which the device would have caught full length as well as any precursors to it. Waiting on results from that. Alternative is a sub dermal device for 3 year monitoring (insert would, um “hurt”. May end up here anyway.) FYI, my Fitbit 6 catches incidents of AFIB, doesn’t alarm/report until incident is done, but it catches them (which if actually needed something done is a bit late, but it does catch the AFIB).

            Thank you. Will research and mark results regarding Watchman Device.

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        2. I was told (no idea where) that sleep apnea can lead to AFIB. I was diagnosed with apnea in 1998, though playing the memory tapes says it was an issue back in 1990 when I was extraordinarily obese–I suspect it got better when I shed half my body weight in ’91, and it likely returned with the fat later in the ’90s.

          (No ablation for me. The doc said that ship had long sailed and sunk. In a few decades, he thinks I might need a pacemaker. Can’t see why; doesn’t everybody have an early morning pulse rate in the mid 30s? Asking for a friend. :) )

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          1. Yow! Mid-30’s? I know some folks a bit worried then they find my resting pulse rate can drop below 50. At least when I’m healthy, that can happen. dealing with something just now and I’m lucky to get down into the high 70’s at all.

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          3. My ex had both sleep apnea and AFIB, then developed congestive heart failure. He might have lived longer if he had actually used the cpap and taken steps to improve his health. But you can’t force people to be healthy.

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        1. In Canuckistan they don’t have the balls to actually refuse treatment — they just put you on a long, loooong waiting list and hope you croak.

          But there’s no waiting list for ‘MAID’. :-(

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    2. Having known a few docs that worked for the VA, this is much worse.

      Let that sink in a little.

      Worse than the VA, not least because it is the only game in town. At least if you’re an indigent veteran you can crawl to the county hospital ER for another kick at the can. Not in Canada. You gotta drive to Buffalo.

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      1. With Trump #45, now veterans can bypass the VA if they can’t get in to see the VA. Not that getting in to a regular clinic is any picnic. Better than the VA, but faint praise indeed.

        Learned recently that son has been dropped by clinic because he hasn’t been in to see anyone for the last 3 years. Because he hasn’t needed to see anyone (not on medicare, too young). He essentially ends up paying out of pocket (what insurance he has is essentially catastrophic insurance). Right now he just needs his cholesterol Lipid(A) checked. It is inherited condition of cholesterol. Since I have a problem … needs checking. No one is taking patients currently. He is on a wait list.

        We, he and I, and talked to the patient coordinator. He, hubby, me, his maternal grandmother and grandfather (before he died), have the same GP primary. What was happening to me, and problem is known to be genetic through me, and directly related to his maternal grandfather. Waiting to see what happens. I’m thinking he’s going to just have to pay out of pocket for the test regardless (he loses insurance when his employer shuts down in the next few months, once current jobs are done. Probably end of August.)

        While US care isn’t as bad as Canada. I isn’t roses either. At least there is urgent and emergency care. But those are jammed. BIL (hubby’s brother) was in emergency care for hours and he was brought in via ambulance barely alive (breathing, not bleeding, and stable -ish, still barely alive … He’s doing better, now.)

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      2. As both a disabled vet and doc who’s worked military, PHS, private practice and FQHCs over more 40 years, and dealt with systems in Germany, Kuwaiit, UAE, a few ‘stans, I have plenty of firsthand experience in different health systems. The IHS hits bottom with VA not close behind. The “community access” doesn’t work well if none of specialists in your area take VA. I had to wait 6 months and still didn’t get the referral through VA and had to self refer through Medicare Advantage which worked fine.

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      3. My adopted grandpa lived in Edmonton and had Crohn’s. They suspected he had developed cancer. 6 month wait for an MRI, but he was lucky and had the money to go to the private clinic in Calgary where they did the MRI, found the cancer and he got the treatment. He ended up passing away a few years later, but at least it gave him a chance.

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    5. The VA is currently not referring me to ortho because they know ortho will say i need both knees replaced.

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  2. My sister in Holland had an interesting experience with the “free” health care system there. She came down with Lyme disease and was given the usual course of antibiotics for that.

    When that was finished, or a bit later, she still felt not well, so she went back to the doctor for followup, suggesting that her Lyme was not fixed. The answer she got: “well, you got the treatment, so obviously you’re cured”.

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    3. In the Netherlands, a doctor decided that the conditions had been fulfilled to euthanize a woman. She drugged her. When the woman struggled and begged for her life, the doctor had her relatives hold her down for the death.

      A judge ruled that the doctor couldn’t have known it was wrong.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Anyone else sometimes wonder if Britain (and subsequently Canada and the US) came in on the wrong side of The Great War?

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  3. Canada: where they would rather kill you than heal you.

    Well, it’s quicker and cheaper than actually healing people, isn’t it?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. That it is. Especially considering that once you’re dead, you can’t be a drain on the national healthcare budget anymore. Problem solved.

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      1. Squid farms on mars, and a bunch of unknowable and immeasureables about the opportunity costs of being that sort of murderous henwit.

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  4. To be fair, cost will always be an issue in healthcare. The services of the doctor are not free, nor is the development of drugs to treat you. And, at some point, when those numbers start to add up to what seems like an astronomical sum, you have to ask, “Is it worth it?”

    The difference between the American and Canadian systems, though, is that the person asking, “Is it worth it?” is different. For example, the “Mary” you describe above, in America would have to decide if being free of the pain in her hips was worth the cost of having surgery now, even knowing she’s likely doubling the cost because she’ll need surgery again in her 50s or 60s, or if she’d rather wait a decade or so and get a set of hips that will last her the rest of her life. In Canada, the bureaucrats look at that, and the decision is obvious: save money and effort and do it once. The fact that Mary is in pain right now is no skin off their noses.

    The further those decisions get from the patient, the more they’re going to come down on the “do the cheap thing” option. It happens here with insurance, but there at least the various insurance companies compete, and negative reviews from patients do affect them. When the government is making the decisions, though, there’s no motivation to listen to patients. What are they going to do, move? If so, that’s one less person who needs to care. The government is the ultimate monopoly, and in this circumstance will almost always make things worse.

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    1. “…no motivation to listen to patients.”

      That works for them until “A la lanterne!”, or a shot from ambush, becomes the default response to that sort of arrogance.

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  5. For folks who were wondering why the sudden frantic “Epstein-ape-squat” from the left, now we know. Someone got wind that info on the 2016 coup attempt was about to drop, and the Left tried to steal the lightning. Whoops. And we may also get some hot stuff on 2020 and 2024. I suspect Mr. Trump has been sharpening that particular gladius for some time, and is now going to ensure it gets stuck in good hard and often.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yes. Since the Russia Hoax referral to the DOJ for indictments, “Epstein, Epstein, but Esptein!” screeches have dropped dramatically. Even in usual outlets. Although the WSJ suit #47 filed probably has had effect there. Passing the republican resolution on releasing “credible and legal files”, which all democrats apposed (no? Really? No kidding.) Helped too. House recessed before the democrats could force “release everything, credible, legal, or not”.

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      1. Meanwhile I can’t help but notice that the Democrats didn’t care even the slightest bit about making the Epstein files public while China Joe occupied the White House, nor did the press. Nor were any of them the slightest bit interested in whether he was actually capable of doing the job they’d procured for him. The whole outrage outbreak was fake from start to finish…and it probably isn’t finished yet.

        Liked by 1 person

    3. I’ve decided to combined conspiracy theories (even if, or maybe especially if they don’t any sense together), so:

      The Epstein client list was on the 18.5 minutes of tape erased during Watergate.

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  6. American system is not perfect.

    Socializing medicine does seem to /always/ have the effect of a) bureaucrats have budget to manage b) the more power government has to intervene in economic factors, the more the market distortions damage the efficiency of the economy, and wealth to fund policy becomes more limited.

    Medicine is a per capita cost, with increasing costs for decreasing return. Socializing cuts out the ‘poor have less to spend’ cost control measure. Now, if we could command per capita wealth profit to be infinitely high, then we could potentially afford any less than infinite per capita wealth cost. But, whatever we command, what happens is that we have finite wealth profit.

    Disabled people are a mixture of situations, and some have very limited capacity for individual wealth profits, and others have a higher capacity, but the circumstnaces to achieve it are rare enough that they are likely to only turn a lower if any profit. For bureaucrats trying to do a holistic cost control analysis, the disabled are going to pop out as an obvious case where tax receipts will not match spending, even at minor levels of spending.

    Related, effects of minimum wage. i) true minimum wage remains zero ii) employers will only take on employees who they think they can make a profit with to offset whatever total minimum cost is.

    Related, UBI. 1) I am not persuaded that, say, permanent government disability income ‘gives me time to write poetry’. 2) my hypothetical metaphorical poetry is not necessarily of positive value 3) I am not metaphorically hungry enough to drive me to greatness, nor to push me to create things of real value.

    We replace the ‘poor have less to spend’ cost control measure with the ‘man, those government bureaucrats have a lot of collective power, and maybe their real incentives do not lead them towards the behavior I would prefer to have from them’ cost control measure.

    Before the systemic hazard of, say, consolidation of federal power over medical professions (via regulations, via billing, via university and professional organization influence, and via student loans) allows a bunch of nonsense to be frauded up about a common cold, and vast economic damage to be inflicted.

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    1. Our system is mostly Freedom, mostly-ish. Canada has neither “free” nor “freedom”. The thugs are merely more polite than the norm.

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    2. I often wonder what impact getting the government and insurance companies out of Healthcare would have on the costs and availability of treatment. In willing to bet costs would come down drastically if we got rid of the middlemen. And then freeing up the money paid in insurance and extra taxes might mean that people could afford the treatments they need.

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      1. I often wonder what impact getting the government and insurance companies out of Healthcare would have on the costs and availability of treatment. In willing to bet costs would come down drastically if we got rid of the middlemen.

        Well, you may have to re-think your definition of “middlemen”. One major driver of medical costs is “defensive medicine”, protecting against a litigation system that allows for suing at the drop of a hat and with no real consequences for frivilous lawsuits. And as long as that’s the case, malpractice insurance companies will be in the driver’s seat.

        It’s why we had to put in carve outs for gun manufacturers and vaccine makers. And as Jerry Pournelle pointed out back in the day, we’ve effectively allowed software manufacturers to do the same thing via EULA.

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  7. “It was up to the healthcare bureaucrats to decide when someone is allowed to have hip surgery.”

    Yes it is, and their decisions are very difficult to overturn. It isn’t healthcare. It is healthcare rationing.

    Furthermore, there is no private system for you to go to if #RichUncle decides to pay for it. You must leave the country to get a service like that, you can’t have it done in Canada. Any doc who works in the public system (which is all of them) can’t provide fee-for-service outside the system as well. It’s illegal.

    Since Covid of course the old doctors who were keeping everything glued together all quit (not least because so many of them knew enough to quit instead of taking the Mad Science Jab) and what’s left are foreign medical graduates. By which I mean Indians. You go to the emergency room in Toronto and it looks like you are in Delhi.

    Now, normally this is fine, because normally you have some assurance that your Foreign Medical Graduate got their training and license the proper way, and they know what they’re doing. But not anymore. India it seems has a pretty big scandal regarding medical training. Cash for diploma type thing. FYI.

    Dealing with the medical system in Canada is exactly the same as dealing with the DMV. You come with all your papers in order, you come with a HEALTHY PERSON to stand over you and protect you from idiots, and you have your lawyer’s phone number handy in case they decide to make an example out of you. And you come prepared to wait.

    You are not a patient, or a customer, or even a revenue source. You are a COST, you are taking up a bed, and they want to be rid of you as expeditiously as possible.

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    1. At least it’s not gotten to the extremes of Not-So-Great Britain, where they will arrest you and throw you in jail for trying to leave the country to get medical treatment when British National Health refuses to provide any. “You’ve been denied treatment! Just shut up and die!”

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    2. The bureaucrats are not doctors — but they have the authority to dictate how doctors are allowed to practice medicine. They control the money, and the medical licenses. Doctors who dare to disobey the bureaucrats are permanently excommunicated from medical practice.

      Not only are patients considered nothing but costs to be reduced, so are the doctors, nurses, medical technicians, hospitals and medical equipment. Some time ago I read that there are more MRI machines in Philadelphia than in all of Canada.

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      1. “more MRI machines in Philadelphia than in all of Canada“

        –

        Heard a believable rumor, that there are a few small northern border towns with more MRI and other medical scanning devices than the town per capita would suggest. All because Canadians come across the border to utilize the machines.

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        1. Fraser Health or whoever runs their system in BC has been in the news for sending people across the border to Bellingham, WA for cancer treatment.

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          1. Yes, and Province of BC has been in the news for trying to refuse payment to those patients. I believe it went to the Supreme Court of Canada, although I could be wrong on that detail. Federal Court of Appeals at least.

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          2. I was thinking of Bonners Ferry, Idaho as one. Bonus, despite the weather that border crossing is open 24/7, 365 days/year. Unlike some in Montana.

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        2. Small towns in Southern Utah share a mobile MRI machine. It comes to where it is requested. Or you can go to St. George, SLC, Provo, or Vegas.

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      2. “Some time ago I read that there are more MRI machines in Philadelphia than in all of Canada.”

        You know, you guys should not tempt me. I can go on for -days- about this.

        Yes, I’m sure there are more MRI machines, CAT scanners and PET scanners in Philly than in all of Canada. Please do not think this is a funding issue, because you can put an MRI machine in a sea container-sized trailer and drive it around from town to town. I looked into it once, they’re (comparatively) cheap. Excellent business model. Those things could be roaring around Canada scanning everybody with no waiting time. They won’t let you do that here. It’s -illegal-.

        The reason is they are using false scarcity to ration scans.

        Yeah, you read that right. We don’t have more machines here, because if we did there would be more scans. A physician can’t ignore the results of an imaging scan. He/she will be sued out of their socks.

        Which means more patients to treat, which means more waiting lists because they don’t have the capacity (because they don’t want to pay for the capacity), and long waiting lists make them look bad.

        We don’t have scanners so they won’t look bad. No, I am not kidding, nor am I over-simplifying. You can get MAiD faster than you can get an MRI for most things. That’s a policy decision, not an accident.

        Now, another issue is what somebody said, towns along the border have heavy-duty diagnostic centers/surgical centers that they don’t need. Yes, that is true, they do. People regularly flit down to Buffalo NY or Burlington VT to get the imaging/surgery/cancer treatment that they can’t get in Canada at all, or they can’t get it in a timely fashion. This is A Thing as they say.

        But it is actually worse than that. If I get my knee scanned by MRI in Buffalo and pay cash myself, unless I come armed with a lawyer my guy in Canada may not be able to use that scan for diagnosis. They will make me wait -anyway- for a proper Canadian MRI scan.

        Yes, that also is a true thing, and it has been that way for quite some time.

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        1. Been oworking on the corporate side of Canadian Healthcare for years. Annual # scans is determined by what the gov’t decides to pay. Patient need not considered.

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          1. Canada is -way- past the point of solud moral reason to change regimes. It only gets worse, more bloody, from here.

            And you folks are going to draw us into the mess you are making, since so many of you live less than an afternoon drive away.

            And you really won’t like our solutions.

            So please, before this becomes our problem, solve yours

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              1. I assume they would much rather not. I don’t want them either, not as States. They bolloxed up their own selves bigly. No, no, no way do I want them voting here. No sir. Not until they are only as effed up as the local Rhinoceros party twits. (grin – “sorry”)

                Some of them -might- however, wind up a “protectorate” of the USA. This has all sorts of downsides, long term. Although it might not be as bad as being part of a semi-feudal Froggish-led genocidal “Peoples Democratic Republic”. PDRs go rather pear shaped for almost all participants.

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                1. I’m thankful to be an American now. I wouldn’t want Canada to be part of the US. I think the Canadian people need to make a stand and fight for their rights soon or we need to start beefing up our northern border.

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                  1. I think you need to go back and consider the thinking of the people of the various territories before they chose to become states within the Union. Why did they choose to hitch their wagons to the U.S. team? What benefits were they looking for? And conversely, what benefits were our Congressional representatives looking for for justification to admit them? That’s primarily why I suggest this as a province-by-province consideration, not as an all of Canada at once one. If their reasons to join are the same as the reasons to join as say, Hawaii, Alaska, or even Texas, and the benefits to us are similar, then by all means we should extend the invitation to at least consider it.

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                    1. Why did they choose to hitch their wagons to the U.S. team?

                      Mostly because they were ALREADY Americans before they moved to the territory, especially the first settlers who were often the political leaders.

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        2. Oh, the scarcities of medical resources are real all right; they’re just deliberately caused by the government. Arbitrary restrictions on the numbers of doctors, nurses, medical schools, hospitals and medical equipment cause genuine shortages and kill people.

          A 6 month delay in cancer diagnosis and treatment can allow a curable cancer to become terminal. Heads should roll.

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  9. Not all docs take Medicare, so that is a problem. Why? Medicare reimbursement is … poor. I will leave it there. BUT it is good for hospitalizations, and major stuff, thus far. Prescriptions? Yeah.

    I am in a mutual assurance pool. It is old-school insurance, where I pay out-of-pocket and get reimbursed after I submit my bills. It has hard caps. Since I’m basically healthy, and have the resources to pay for my primary care, it works very well for me. I was mildly surprised (OK, had sticker shock) when I had to have surgery a few years ago, and the amount I was quoted left he gasping for air. I said I could put $$$$ down and would need to arrange payment plans for the rest. The admin said, “Oh! Cash? Then it is $$$.” A third the insurance cost if I paid cash. Which tells you how much paperwork and no-pay patients costs the hospital.

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    1. We don’t use our “dental” from our medicare advantage. We could. But we have to change clinics and the in network clinics we’d never see the same dental hygienist let alone the same dentist. Instead we pay a fee yearly fee ($395/each) to the clinic we’ve been going to since 1985. Discounted rate for two cleanings and one xray set per year, and get 20% discount on any dental work needed. About what we’d pay if they had to go through the insurance anyway.

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      1. Yes, if you go in and tell them cash upfront, then the cost is much less. Then you can turn it in to the insurance. Not that I bother with ours.

        We still haven’t seen a bill from anyone for hubby’s surgery last November. Keep expecting one. Doctor pre and follow up visits co-pays, seen those. Nothing from the surgery from hospital to doctors.

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    2. Interesting. Before I was eligible for Medicare, I was on a cash basis for INR testing at the hospital/clinic/medical junta. (Was on the low-cost clinic for a few years, but the clientele got me awfully twitchy when I had to transfer from $TRIBAL_TOWN to Flyover Falls.) Cost for a fingerstick INR at the low cost clinic was about $13.00. The one time I tried the hospital’s fingerstick clinic, the base cost was $100+, with a 25% discount for cash. It was cheaper to get a blood draw. Mercifully, I only needed testing every 8 weeks.

      On Medicare, it dropped to maybe $50 for the blood draw, then the finger sticks got universal, and CMS says it’s more like $25–this is 13 years after the low cost clinic, so not too bad.

      The high cash cost seems to be a result of there being damned little competition in town. There’s an independent day surgery center (got my cataracts done there) and all the urgent care centers are independent, but the other medical docs are closely tied to the hospital. Both the cardiac and orthopedic practices have merged into the hospital in the past few years. So far, quality of care is good, but I’m watching closely.

      So far, no eye practices have merged. Locally, it’s basic, cataract and cornea work, with the retina specialists over in Medford. That works, though traveling over the Cascades after a procedure can be way too interesting. (Gas bubbles, altitude changes, and optic nerves can interact in frightening ways, as I learned once.)

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  10. A third the insurance cost if I paid cash. Which tells you how much paperwork and no-pay patients costs the hospital.

    And also how our current insurance structure has distorted the ‘market’.

    Your ‘old school’ insurance is, IMHO, the right model – and this is speaking as a grateful beneficiary of the current distortion (Blue Cross + Medicare).

    One can look to auto/vehicle insurance as another, similar model – not that those insurers are known for their generosity or reasonableness – where it covers the equivalent of major medical, and routine maintenance is up to the owner.

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    1. We asked about the discrepancy between Cash bill VS insurance billed and resulting “discount”. Hospitals and physicians use the insurance “discounted” as noncollectable debt tax write-off. How that helps hospitals who presumably are non-profit, or not-for-profit, IDK. Physicians it makes sense, they do have profits to write the noncollectable debt against.

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      1. Non-profits really aren’t.

        What would normally be considered profit is cycled into new construction and upgrades, in addition to increased compensation, starting at the C-levels (of course), and trickling down, hopefully, but in lesser amounts or percentages, to the rest of the employees. Of course, healthcare organizations try to get as many non-paid volunteers as they can, but they aren’t compensated for it beyond maybe an annual appreciation party. I hate to say it, but they have a considerable number of self-enslaved workers, but at least there are some limits (so far) as to where they can be used.

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  11. The Canadian system sounds like it is worse than the UK NHS, which is quite an achievement. Mind you the NHS is pretty good at killing old people too

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    1. NHS was a very good deal when it was founded just after WWII. Britain had their version of The Influenza after WWI, and they were pulling troops back from all over the world in WWII. Plus the general population had been short on rations and healthcare since 1939. Investing in the health of the citizenry would likely pay back quite well economically.

      You have to remember, “medicine” was X-rays, sulfa drugs, that new penicillin stuff, and a handful of surgical procedures; incredibly simple and cheap by modern standards.

      What happened to the NHS is what happens to every organization: bureaucratic bloat. Which they try to hide by outrageously twisting their reporting, btw.

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  12. I guess I am thankful to live under US health care. Even In flyover country. In Fargo ND (pop 136K) my prostrate operation was done by a DaVinci surgical robot (picture a massive spider crouching over the operating table with arms and knives. The surgeon sits to one side at a game console operating it watching a video camera inserted in my belly). After later complications, even smaller Fergus Falls MN (pop 14.5K) had a CRT/PET scanner and automated x-ray irradiation instrument. Even smaller, Morris MN (pop 5k) brings in a large semi-trailer with a portable MRI scanner every couple weeks.

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    1. That was hubby’s prostrate surgery too. Five incisions, 4 very small ones, one large one in the middle, and only because the middle one had to be big enough to pull out the bagged prostrate. OTOH Eugene, while not Portland, or even Salem, it is bigger than 14.4k population.

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      1. Incontinence occasionally at night. My internal alarm is not as loud, and I sleep soundly. Impotence is not a problem, since there is a lack of opportunity anyway.

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  13. I’m on Iowa Medicare, and last year, when my long-time umbilical hernia decided to back up on me, I got in to my local emergency room with no waiting—and half an hour after I arrived, they had a tube down my nose and into my stomach to pump a lot of nasty stuff out, and were prepping me for a trip to Des Moines in an ambulance. They got me going again in DSM, and a month later or so, I went in for surgery. If I were Canadian, I’d probably have died waiting for care.

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  14. One of the neurologists that diagnosed my disability who was from Canada and immigrated to the US gave me a 10 minute lecture on never allowing the government to adopt Canadian style health care. He moved to the US so he could actually practice medicine and was in the process of getting his parents to move here to get them out of the Canuk system.

    I will say that despite all of the (proven and unconfirmed but credible) horror stories about the VA, the guys at my VFW post are all happy with the care the get at the local VA center.

    I don’t use them as I’ve had good insurance between my former job and wife’s current one, and feel that their resources would be better used by one of my brothers or sisters not as lucky. With here getting ready to retire and going to Medicare, might be time to line it up as an alternative.

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    1. It is very dependent upon the local CBOC AND its relationship to the parent VA hospital system how things go. Remember you have to use the VA at least once a year or so or they mark you inactive and you have to start all over again as a new patient. As you can get your labs and imaging for free through them, you can avoid the co-pays your insurance, especially Medicare, might have and simply take a copy to you community doc. (DO NOT TRUST the VA to send them in a coherent package to your community doc. The little mailer they send to you has the results in a nice compact report while the online and printouts you request are pages and pages of hard to read stuff – and that’s what they fax to the community.). It is also nice for physical therapy and hearing, being free for you, but if the PT is going to be long term their renewal process sucks eggs big time.

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    2. I don’t currently use the VA either, being in a combination of Medicare with Tricare for Life picking up anything MC doesn’t cover. So far, so good, although I’m still stuck with Medicare premiums, and any government healthcare is subject to being trashed at the stroke of a pen.

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  15. My experience with the NHS (in Scotland) started with a doctor surprised I knew what ibuprofen was and ended with my friend going in with an ankle 3 x normal size having it glanced at and poked a couple times (literally that was the sum total of interaction with the injury) and told rest and elevation.

    One missionary I knew (we were there on LDS missions) was sent home for bad stomach pains. Nobody on Scotland could figure it out. He was sent home to the US and in less than a month was diagnosed with an ulcer.

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  16. You can’t lump all healthcare in Canada under the same umbrella. Each Province has its own system and varies. It is easy to criticize Canadian free healthcare and find fault but I can only say the treatment I have received in Ontario has been stellar. Not all provinces have a large population like Ontario and therefore the same resources. Btw our healthcare is not free. We contribute to the system. Nothing is free.

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    1. Rolls eyes.
      It’s funny Coz. I’ve lived in another country with “free” healthcare and I saw the exact same things Ballonatic describes.
      I have only ONE question for you: So, if you contribute, WHY do you want someone else making the decisions on what care you get and taking a cut off the top for administrative?
      Are you a fool, a child or a coward, little coz?

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    2. LOL. Ain’t no healthcare system that can’t be criticized, or stand significant improvement one way or another. If you’re perfectly satisfied with your care, you’re not trying hard enough.

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    3. If “Each province has its own system”, then what is with the instances (documented, when I saw them, but that was 20 or more years ago), where people in Toronto, ON were being made appointments in the health care system 6-12 months out with doctors in Edmonton, AB, and if they told the patient it couldn’t be rescheduled; if they missed the appointment they would never schedule the patient the for treatment again, and of course the transport costs were on the patient. They were doing this to people in your own province.
      And, in many cases, the appointments were 12 or more months out for medical issues that would be fatally irreversible (as in, the issue was treatable and reversible if caught early, fatal if allowed to progress to the next stage) if not treated in 3-5 months?

      To me, that came off as a backhanded way to say “shut up and die” under the guise of “That’s the soonest we can get you in”, before MAID came around.

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    4. I’ve lived in three provinces – Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan. And each of the examples was from one of these provinces. My brother and his wife live within an hour of Toronto and she still had an 18 month wait to see a cardiologist.

      Where my father lives in Northern Ontario there are shortages of doctors even with a population that can support them. I’m not sure what he’ll do when his current doctor retires.

      Liked by 1 person

  17. until you find out that she had to wait over 18 months to see that cardiologist. A quick phone call to one of my local cardiology clinics and their average wait time is 4 to 6 weeks.

    [shrugs] The cardiology consult I got a couple of years ago took four months. Nine for an endocrinologist, and going right on 18 for the rheumatologist.

    Your wait time varies primarily by where you live, and secondarily by your insurance coverage, which usually restricts you to a small pool of doctors they work with. And no, we couldn’t drive to the giant city in an adjacent state, that had no shortage of specialists, because our insurance is only good in our state of residence.

    And no, we didn’t have 5K+ to put out for self-pay… even if we could have found doctors that would accept that. Self-pay is pretty much dead, at least where I live.

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    1. Same for insurance. We’re even more limited to specific area within the state (essentially Willamette valley I-5 corridor, Cottage Grove to Portland. Regence BlueAdvantage. We can use Urgent Care or Emergency outside of that area, but we are going to be paying out of pocket and turning in for reimbursement.

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  18. In other Canadian news…

    I got a quick reminder earlier today of how absurdly small the Canadian navy is with the news that the Canadians are scrapping eight of their navy’s coastal patrol vessels. That is nearly one-quarter of the warships in their entire fleet. IIRC, there’s a scheduled plan to replace them, but the replacements are still several years away from delivery.

    I mentioned this to a Canadian friend of mine earlier today, and he joked that the navy would get even smaller when Alberta joined the US and took all of the submarines with it, because the submarines are all in Edmonton.

    If you don’t get the joke, don’t worry about it.

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    1. For those in Canada … Ouch.

      Aside. SNelson, thank you for the link. Spawning multiple links (nine & counting). I get the Twitchy, etc., links through (free) PJ Media articles. Which do not come on Saturday and Sunday.

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