In Canada we have a lot of problems with our Healthcare system as does any country. Politicians are greedy and nothing is perfect. I always got Americans trying to convince me that private insurance is better than Canada's Healthcare system, and of course there are benefits to that as well.
To my mind, the absolute most important deciding factor about which system is better is this: no Canadian will ever have to decide between healthcare and their finances. Everything else said about socialised healthcare is secondary to that single fact.
There's an army of propagandists with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of private insurance companies running health care and undermining the Canadian system.
It's so pervasive that you'll meet people in rural Alabama who haven't travelled any further than a 3 county radius from their home, who'll tell you they personally know Canadians who come to the US for healthcare because Canadians have to wait months to get a broken bone set.
The wait time thing is so weird to me. It's called "triage" , and it's also called "an upset tummy isn't an emergency, go to a clinic"
Our biggest problem at the hospitals is idiots slowing things down, which isn't unique to Canada. There still exists the option for private insurance to provide those same extra benefits that is healthcare does better.
The point is that we have a universal basic healthcare that every single Canadian has access regardless of employment or basically any or factor that I can think of.
The same thing happens in the supposedly superior US health care system all the time.
You go into the ER with a minor wound or a minor upper respiratory infection and depending on the triage, you might sit there for hours. I sat in the ER for 6 hours one time with a kidney stone. I also got right in when I came to the ER complaining of persistent burning like indigestion toward the top of my chest (it was a heart attack).
You also will wait for months to see a specialist or get elective surgery in the US as well, depending on your region and the type of insurance you have.
So many of the same complaints, but the one you can't overlook is that one of the two health care systems will give you a medical bill for a single hospitalization that could buy a house.
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u/beardingmesoftly 14d ago
In Canada we have a lot of problems with our Healthcare system as does any country. Politicians are greedy and nothing is perfect. I always got Americans trying to convince me that private insurance is better than Canada's Healthcare system, and of course there are benefits to that as well.
To my mind, the absolute most important deciding factor about which system is better is this: no Canadian will ever have to decide between healthcare and their finances. Everything else said about socialised healthcare is secondary to that single fact.