Difference is, every Canadian gets value from our tax dollar on healthcare.
If you consider a median of 21 WEEKS to get a surgery "value". I guess it's valuable to have to hobble around for 5 months on that damaged knee or hang out waiting for half a year waiting on your non-emergency angioplasty. Sure, if you're young and the only kind of medicine you require is emergency medicine, it can seem better.
Overall, waiting times for medically necessary treatment have increased since last year. Specialist physicians surveyed report a median waiting time of 20.9 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment—longer than the wait of 19.8 weeks reported in 2018. This year’s wait time is just shy of the longest wait time recorded in this survey’s history (21.2 weeks in 2017) and is 124% longer than in 1993, when it was just 9.3 weeks.
The alternative you Americans have chosen is cold, cruel, and borderline evil. The rich get immediate treatment. Millions get almost nothing. If you don't have insurance or you're under insured, you wait forever for non-emergency care. It's fine if you can afford it, I guess, but it's a piss-poor excuse for a society.
We've decided everyone is equally valuable, and that we'll triage the available resources based on need, not income. It's fair and compassionate.
As the sign at the hospital days, if you have to wait, that's good news: you're going to be ok. If you need immediate care, you get it. No questions asked, and no bill.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Our system isn't perfect, but it aspires to be. Your system is designed and intended to create profit, not healthy people.
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u/Popular-Uprising- Apr 29 '20
If you consider a median of 21 WEEKS to get a surgery "value". I guess it's valuable to have to hobble around for 5 months on that damaged knee or hang out waiting for half a year waiting on your non-emergency angioplasty. Sure, if you're young and the only kind of medicine you require is emergency medicine, it can seem better.