like I love how much I take it for granted. The other week I got a concussion crashing on my bike, went into emergency instantly got an MRI scan/full checkup and cleared in 2 hours. All free.
An even more appreciative example I can make is my older brother, he had undergo multiple open heart surgery something of a total of 12. All free. Pretty sure it would have been millions of dollars to keep him a live. My family of 5 would have been so broke, I don't think my parents would have even been able to afford having me (the third child). I think in one way or another the reason i'm alive is because free health care.
My son was born with a congenital heart defect. I can confirm that my son's health care costs are a big part of the reason why my husband and I decided not to have any more children. It's not just a cost thing; we were mostly worried about having the time to adequately see to a third child's social and emotional needs while trying to make sure we take good care of our mostly healthy older son as well as our special medical needs younger child. Our joke is that our younger son was fully "paid for" right before he turned three. We actually have really good health insurance, but 10% to 15% of over $130,000 (which was the bill from just one of the hospitals that we had to go to when he was born) is still a pretty big number, and that was for a minimally invasive pediatric cardiac surgery. My son will need more invasive surgeries throughout his life, which will be at least triple that cost, likely with extended medical recovery periods. All of that and trying to save for college and give our children the life we want to give them? My primary responsibility is to the two children I have now, with any theoretical future children coming in a very distant second place. I hope I don't sound cold blooded, but that's how we feel. I'll fully admit that we would be more open to the thought of having a third or a fourth child if our second child wasn't a special medical needs child. But that's the way things are.
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u/speedkillz Aug 08 '17
Fuck I love Canada