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Having employer-sponsored medical insurance is generally better than Canadian health care. I'm Canadian living in the US. Of course, having Canadian public heal
by docker_up 7y ago
Having employer-sponsored medical insurance is generally better than Canadian health care. I'm Canadian living in the US. Of course, having Canadian public health care is better when you don't have much money.
I needed an MRI. I got one the next day through Kaiser. My friend had a suspected gallstone. It took her 4 months to get an MRI scheduled. She had to live with pain during those 4 months.
Her children are both diagnosed with autism. It took 2.5 years to get therapy paid for by the government. The only other option besides waiting was to pay for therapy herself which was $80,000/year. She couldn't afford it so her children had to wait without therapy during the most crucial times for therapy. Recently, the Ford government decided upon spending cuts that will limit her youngest son with severe autism to 2 more years of care and then they get nothing.
With Kaiser, they have a top standard autism program where children get instantly put into. My friend is a medical doctor specializing in this and he said the Kaiser program was great. When I told him that my friend had to wait 2.5 years in Canada, he was shocked and saddened for the children.
Before the younger son could get diagnosed with autism, he had to undergo an MRI to ensure there wasn't anything specifically wrong with his brain. They waited 3.5 months, and then when they got to the MRI appointment, they were told their appointment was cancelled, and they had to wait another month.
My aunt was scheduled for gall stone surgery in Toronto but it was also months in advance. One weekend she went to emergency because was vomiting from pain. They put her in a bed and scheduled her for surgery at the hospital. If she left, she would have to wait for the scheduled surgery but if she took an emergency room spot, she could get surgery sooner. She had occupy that bed for 1.5 weeks until they finally scheduled her for surgery, taking the place of other patients. We asked if we could move her to another hospital that didn't have the wait and they said no, she had to stay in that hospital otherwise she would lose her place.
These are experiences just with people I know. I've lived much of my life with Canadian health care and I trust it. But what you don't pay with money you pay with time.
I've found that most people in the US want government health care, but they also want a private option, which is untenable for such a large country, and illegal in Canada. They have a 2 party health care system in Australia but the quality difference is vast. With public and private, you can criticism that only rich people get the best health care but with a single public system, everyone waits. So there's no great way.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago>Having employer-sponsored medical insurance is generally better than Canadian health care. Some lucky employees in the US have generous health insurance benefits. But the majority, by far, do not. Kaiser itself is a uniquely high performing organization, that serves a very small portion of the US population. The employer has nothing to do with the quality of the healthcare the patient receives, other than being in a sufficiently lucrative business to be able to pay for nice health insurance. Health insurance and healthcare would be much better for everyone if employers were left out of the whole equation so that more healthy, lower cost lives get mixed in with higher cost lives in order to create a viable marketplace for multiple health insurance companies to be able to compete for business on healthcare.gov.
- vkou 7y agoKaiser doesn't treat many people over the age of 65, because the overwhelming majority of them aren't working, and those that are, aren't working somewhere they can get Kaiser healthcare. Any healthcare system can be made 'cheap' and 'good', if it mostly cuts out old people. If Canada just kicked old people off the healthcare bus to die alone, I'm sure both the waitlists, and the tax bills would be a lot smaller.
- refurb 7y agoAs a Canada-US transplant that's been my experience as well. If you have good coverage through work, you'll get better care in the US than in the public Canadian system. Of course, not everyone in the US has good coverage through work...
- xenospn 7y ago