Canadians skip waiting lines to pay through the nose for advanced medical scanning procedures, therefore paying through the nose is the best way forward!!

YAAAYYY

What a retarded way of thinking.

Hey, as long as the no-waiting includes semi-emergency services akin to and with the predictability of the ethics of trauma center care for cost-prohibitive percutaneous coronary intervention, they can bill me...I simply may not be able to pay all at once, but I'll guarantee with confidence and a certainty from experience that I won't get turned-away from the table, with or without insurance. If we have to, and taking a cue from the fine United States citizens bordering our neighbors to the north, we'll simply stroll into Canada-

Everyone's gonna go someday until we don't have to unless we choose to and the alternative to the flesh dying and that kind of longevity probably won't happen for at least a hundred years or more....Timing. Almost everything.

I'm gonna say there was some *Canada in that video, eh?

Adding video to channels (Canada) - requested by Lendl.

I don't know about the rest of Canada, but Quebec's health system sucks compared to the Australian system. It's a goddamn joke.

My girlfriend and I got a bad case of gastro a few months back, so we went to a walk in clinic. We had to line up at 6:30 in the morning so we were first in line. Waited for 1 hour before they let us inside, another hour before they started calling patients, went into triage, waiting another 20 minutes for the doctor (whom misdiagnosed her when she was getting mono a month later) to finish his little chat out the door to finally see us. Charged us each $20 for our goddamned sick notes (which was the real reason we actually wanted to go). All up, it took about 4-5 hours. So yeah, we didn't get charged for the consultation, big fucking deal.

Back in Australia I got food poisoning once. I had moved not long so wasn't familiar with any doctor offices around. Opened yellow pages (it was a while ago) found a GP down the road, made an appointment that day, went down there at about midday, probably waited about 10-20 minutes, she diagnosed me, gave me a doctor's note for work, and I paid about $30 for the consultation. It took less than an hour.

In Quebec, it's nigh impossible to get a GP, and if you do get one and if you need to see the doctor, it can take months to wait for a simple appointment. For everything else you have to go to the horrible walk-in clinics.

Having said that, I'm still glad I don't have to rely on the US health system, but goddamn I miss Australia for many reasons, this being one of them.

LOL did that blowhard Burr just say "American people prefer their system".... wow that guy is ready for retirement.

I wonder where he gets his big money from:
Oh! #2 on the list
2 13 Health Professionals $469,649 $272,949 $196,700

Another P.O.S. senator.

Just asking.

Why do you think it too so long ? Government bureaucracy? ineptness? No one really cares how long you wait? Surge of ill people causing temporary under staffing?

Why did Australia service you so quickly?

In BC, "walk in clinics" are privately owned. They have strict guidelines, and can only charge the various medical plans $xx.xx per whatever. Only the true Emergency Rooms at hospitals are run directly.

You should be making complaints if your stay is over an hour. Here in Victoria, I've never been charged for any clinic visit, and never have spent more than 45 minutes in said clinic. Granted, it feels longer when you're sick, but all in all, the "anti-single payer"s down in the States are full of shit.

Yes, we get triage in the wait room in emerge. and it can be slow. but you do get served.

We have four options in Canada.
1). Have a regular GP (General Practitioner), and book regular appointments
2). Go to a drop in clinic. (still uses our medical plan, have never had to pay, and always got served in a timely matter)
3). Go directly to emergency - IF it's an emergency (some people use this service when it is not an emergency, which backs up the system)
4). Call an ambulance - (A person escorted into Emerg, bypasses the triage line and gets service priority. Don't abuse this system)

Yes, every member of my family has spent time in the hospital at one point or another. We've never been charged for anything. not for the service, the supplies, the overnights. or what ever,

No one has died, though two members of my family could have without immediate emergency surgery.

I have no real complaints over the Canadian Medical System, other than the wait times on elective surgeries. Waiting for these surgeries are inconvenient but if it's important enough, your GP will push to get you in sooner if needed. so talk to your GP about it, don't complain to your friends.

Also, I personally don't know anyone who pays money to go to the US for Medical procedures. I'd really like to see the statistics on those numbers and who these people are. Because it's not the general public.

I think it's because Quebec has a shortage of doctors because Quebec in it's infinite stupidity and xenophobia do not allow doctors to practice unless they speak high level french (the same reason I can't get Permanent Residency here while other Aussie friends in BC and Ontario had no issue). I guess we simply didn't have a serious shortage in Australia. It's so easy to find a GP, I guess it might be harder to find one that Bulk Bills (medicare takes the entire cost of consultation) for low income earners.

My experience at hospitals is limited. When i got hit on the head by a cricket bat, i had to wait 2 hours, I think (was a long time ago), to get stitches. And when I had my tonsils out, I had to wait 6 months for the elective surgery because we didn't have private insurance.

My girlfriend had to go to the ER when she had mono here, we had to wait an hour or two before she was seen by a doctor. While we were there, the hospital was fucking decrepit, the waiting room was freezing (there was a lady who had a broken arm and she was violently shivering), and nearer the end of the day (my GF had to have an IV drip so we had to wait around there all day to see if it helped her) an old lady was called up and as she was walking past she said she had been there since 8 in the morning and they had literally forgotten about her.

One of my friends has an issue with kidney stones, they build up and he has to have surgery to get them out. He had a procedure booked for I don't know how long, went to the hospital and they told him they didn't have any beds left and he had to wait another week.

The Jewish General has now been instructed to turn away off-island patients. It has the best cancer treatment facility of any hospital, so people with cancer are now instructed to kindly fuck off.

The new, mega hospital in Vendome is waaaay over budget and time, and people (particularly old people) can't even get to it from the metro station right near it!

I'd love to move to Vancouver...

I'd really love to move to Vancouver...

Alberta checking in. I have used all 4 options EvilDeathBee mentioned and have no major complaints.

Quebec construction industry is quite corrupt which is a factor in the Vendome hospital being delayed.

You should seriously consider Alberta. It is colder but your buying power is much better.

Worth keeping in mind that the reason the US has such short lines for medical services, is because so few people can afford to get in line.

Canada has the opposite issue. Anyone can get medical care, so there are a lot of people waiting for their turn.
(Note that non-elective procedures skip to the head of the line, so you're not waiting around to fix something immediately life threatening.)

Seems like a combo approach would be ideal.
Have both public and private medicine.
- People that can't spare the time, that want elective procedures, can go private.
- People that can wait go public.
- People that need non-elective procedures can go either private or public and get their work done right away regardless.

-scheherazade

I'm pretty sure your "combo approach" is precisely what the Canadian system is. People can always spend money to go private, if they prefer. I hear of very few choosing to do so, however.

2 week hospital stay nurses checking in every half hour, even while we slept.

liquid food for 8 days through an IV, nurse told me it was 750 per bag/24 H

Specialists attending..

Four CAT scans maybe six. depending on how you want to group the time frame.

um...

ambulance ride covered by the province.

they took blood work twice a day.. I mean people were all up in my shit, LITERALLY ! oh a colonoscopy, and dietician.

SO those two weeks cost Alberta/Canada a lot of money. How much would that cost a person who is poor as fuck with a pre existing condition ?

I really wonder because if it was more than 500 dollars I would be in debt pretty decent if it was not for the health care system Canada has.

This elective stuff.. when I was getting scanned for tumors in my head or abnormalities again a CAT scan, I had to wait for a month, and it was not life threatening stuff, the EEG I waited 2 weeks for. again not life threatening.

My experience has been very well, although sometimes it has pissed me off. If I had this shit happen to me in America I think a bullet that costs .05 cents would be a better option that a life of 12 thousand a year debt for.. ever.

I did not like that one person, senators a -ok, doctor a-ok.. name plate hidden jack ass- not so much.

Oh and my pills costs roughly 90-120 dollars a month, I actually don't know because I have never paid for them.

GO CANADA!
GO ALBERTA !
being poor sucks though. been sick for a year.

Canadian from Manitoba checking in here. Things like crutches, prescription medications, and ambulances are out of pocket expenses. Got something like diabetes? Expect to be spending a lot of money every month on drugs.

For life threatening emergencies or even broken bones and stitches our system works great for people, and no worries about going broke, you just go in anyways. Our federal and provincial taxation levels though are also much higher than in the US and a large percentage of that is spent directly on health care. I don't know what level of health insurance that amount would buy each Canadian, but it is important to remember that the Canadian healthcare system is NOT free.

I must say I do prefer the Canadian system to the American one. Largely on the basis of not seeing working class families being financially destroyed by life threatening and uninsured medical conditions.

I can't just say that though without pointing out that our Canadian system has it's own serious flaws. I know of people with back injuries putting them off work until they can get surgery, and that surgery being a waiting time for them measured in years. They flew down to the states to spend thousands of dollars out of pocket to get the surgery in weeks instead, and were financially ahead too over those two years since they could get back to work. Patients showing symptoms that might indicate major heart conditions or other illnesses who would get an immediate MRI or other expensive diagnostic in the states straight away will routinely wait months in Canada.

That is all just a long winded way to say the Canadian system is far from perfect and has very serious problems and flaws in it that are negatively impacting peoples health and financial well being too. It's no magic bullet.

Easily $100K+ for that list. Even in the midwest, where things are relatively cheap, any hospital visit -starts- at around $2000 per day, and each additional service, no matter how tiny adds three or four figures to it. Anything major, would likely run $20K and up.

Lived in Ontario (28 years), Brisbane, Australia (5 years), Alberta (7 years), and now Texas (14 years).

Agree with pretty much with Boneremake on Alberta, gets more points than Ontario. My Australian experience was good, in both the city and rural (blew an eardrum due to infection in Longreach QLD at Xmas... the doctor was drunk when they wheeled him into emerg, but he was a gentle, caring drunk).

Small things in Ontario are manageable - anything requiring stuff beyond typical emergency room patching up in more rural locations (my definition - anywhere far enough from Toronto that you can't see the nighttime glow, so north of Newfenmarket sort of) is quite lacking (v. long wait times for things like weekly dialysis, MRI, even open MRI, GI tract scoping, ultrasounds, contrast X-rays etc). Parental unit #1 with diabetes requiring 3 times a week dialysis almost snuffed it as there were only 4 chairs in the unit 14 miles from home, got on the list and had to wait for someone to die before getting on the team. Finally snuffed it when they shut down these 4 chairs and the new unit was now a 90 mile round trip 3 times a week for man who could barely walk or see. Died from exhaustion, not diabetes. 2nd parental unit needs an MRI for some serious GI issues, can't keep food down, losing weight rapidly. Wait 4.5 months and we'll see if we can get you in. I'm having her measured for the box.

Having said that, the situation is easier to describe in Texas, the land of excess (excessive wealth and excessive poverty).

Good health insurance plan, preferably through employer with lots of employees = wait times for advanced procedures measured usually in minutes or hours, sometimes days, but not weeks or months. You get taken care of, and your birthing room at the local maternity ward looks like the Marriott (just Couryard though, so no mini-bar or microwave).

Mediocre or no health insurance plan = pray you never get sick enough to require more than what you can buy at the CVS or splint up by watching do-it-yourself first aid videos on youtube, because an unplanned night in the hospital or a trip to emerg in the short bus with swirly lights followed by admission can, for many, wipe them out or sure eat up Bobby's college fund. No exaggeration. I have insurance, but for a reference point, one night in hospital (elective) for a turbinectomy (google it people) including jello and ice cream came in at $14,635. Yes, one night. 24 hours. Do the math. An emergency room visit for a forearm cut requiring 13 stitches (and I didn't even bleed on their white sheets - just cut through the skin to the fat tissue) was billed at $2,300 bucks. Our new baby tried to exit the meatbag as a footling breach, so emergency C-sectioned him out, and one extra night in hospital (2 in total) - all up, billed at just shy of $24K. We now have 3 full service hospitals within 5 miles of our house, and a full service children's hospital in the same radius. And they just started building another. Somebody's making money. If you don't have insurance, or your insurance is shitty (huge deductibles, huge copays) you will eat much of these types of costs. Rule: cheaper to die than get sick.

Ontario and AB might have longer wait times, but even an 83 year old woman in a rural Ontario village with no pension, insurance, income or large stacks of cash can (eventually) get the health care she needs without spending unjustifiable amounts of money. Happy birthday mom.

My 2¢

Agreed except on point 4 - any competent ER will still triage you after coming in via ambulance. Granted, the majority of the time the ambulance will bring in someone in dire straits so it'll make sense that they'll get seen immediately, but if a Frequent Flier arrives via ambulance and is not in imminent trouble, the likelihood that they'll wait increases.

As for Quebec's problems, those have been well documented by others, well done.

Most of the governments have done a pretty good job in the past couple decades improving wait times across Canada - always can be better, but the good Doctor's point on reallocating resources more efficiently is well stated!

Things will change in Canada now, Harper did a sneaky modification to health care. They're limiting the amount that the Federal gov't will give the provinces. They're also putting limitations on things that should not be limited (eg. nurses, Veteran support, specialists.)

In Ontario, things are pretty good. It has it's problems, but everyone can get seen. I think, unless this legislation gets changed, it's going to start going down hill in the next five to ten years.

I don't get the wait times argument from those who oppose a single payer system. They clearly never went to an emergency room in the US. I've never had a short wait time in a US ER/Stat Care/Ultra Care type facility. Even when they seem empty it seems like an hour wait before you finally see a doctor. Oh your 2 year old is having a hard time breathing, wait an hour and a half. Your one year old is running a high fever and vomiting, wait two hours. Heck, the wait times to find a doctor if you don't already have a family doctor can be weeks or months, forcing you to go to the ER for stuff you'd probably normally see a doctor for. That isn't an efficient medical system. They anti-single payer people then will say they don't trust the government to make decisions about their health insurance... but they trust the one of the most profitable, per dollar earned, business in the US? (I vaguely recall insurance being number 3 in per dollar earned profits, right behind banks and pharmaceuticals, with a rather large gap to get to number four.) They don't get those huge profits by making decisions in the best interest of the patients and consumers. Walmart could pay $3 more per hour to every employee, give them benefits, increase the work force, and still make profits without raising prices, meaning that while half the work force there needs food stamps now, none would if the company would do the right thing and pay a living wage, but instead we have people mad at the people who work there for not making enough rather than the people who run it... anyhow the point is people like that, who run the business, can't be trusted to make decisions about your health insurance as they only care about their bottom line and their paycheck. Getting you the proper health care costs them money and they will gladly sacrifice you and your family for a better paycheck for them.

Oh and another thing you should probably remember about Canada.

Estimated Population of Canada, 2013 - 35,158,300

Total Eligible Voters in California, 2013 - 23,857,732 (est Pop. 38.4M)

You 'merikuns are TAD bit more numerous than us. We had a "$2Million" long gun registry that annually ate HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of dollars, and every single person that really needed to participate completely ignored.

I can barely imagine the bureaucratic nightmare your combative legislative system will create, but honestly, you'd probably be better off on the whole.

My wife's last trip to the ER in the US: 26 hours to get admitted to the hospital.

Fuck the US healthcare system. I have lost my entire life's work after getting layed off and my wife becoming ill. I can't even tell you what I owe since I couldn't bare to open the bills after it passed 6 figures. With the bankruptcy I will be left with very little of what I spent my life building.

I played the game. I upheld my end of the contract. I got screwed the first opportunity some rich prick had to earn an extra dime for the investors.

Fuck you if you believe healthcare isn't a universal right.

Here is a longer 18 minute video of more of Senator Burr's questions to the witnesses. I wish I could find the full hearing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0Gxtsz1A

It includes this little gem from Senator Burr, "The American system HAS access to healthcare for everybody, it's called the Emergency Room. Now we don't admit that because clearly we are lobbying for a particular angle, but every American can access healthcare."

Nice slight of hand there Senator, only difference is whenever I go to the emergency room (I live in Canada), I don't get a bill in the mail a few weeks later that I have to pay.

The average American ER visit costs $600 dollars in 2009, today it's probably well more than that, and that's just for simple problems. Anything more serious than a urinary tract infection and you are going to be paying thousands of dollars.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I'll give my 2 cents on my experiences with the Healthcare system in Quebec.

I use the public system and private system and constantly dabble between the two. Wait times can be long for sure. I've had a long running ankle problem since my teens, and to get my first appointment with an ankle specialist here took 1 year and 3 months!

My MRI was covered by private insurance, so it only took a couple days to have the scan done. I was put on a surgery waiting list for just over 2 years. The Dr let me know that he operated at a private clinic in Montreal. I could have had the surgery in only 2 weeks, at a cost of around $5000, but because my pain was minimal and I could still walk, I opted to wait.

Post surgery access to follow up appointments was swift. I could easily see the Dr in a week or two, with very little advanced notice. Follow up MRI's weren't covered by my new private insurance, so I had to wait for an MRI scan, which took around 2 months. I was supposed to have an MRI arthrogram, but the waiting list for that procedure is about twice as long, so the Dr just opted for a regular MRI. Cost for an MRI arthrogram is $875 in private. Again I just waited it out.

I've only needed to go to the emergency room twice, since I've been here, both times I was in and out in under an hour and a half.

I've been to many walk-in clinic's. These are a crapshoot, sometimes they're incredibly fast, sometimes incredibly slow.

I don't have a family Dr, so I opt to go to a Dr at a private clinic for my annual checkups. Even private clinics are a grey zone sometimes, as some services are covered by the provincial plans, so visits to the GP cost out of pocket, but visits to specialists within the same clinic are free.

Finding a family Dr is definitely plausible, it just involves phoning around every clinic and/or Dr in Montreal asking if they have space, but I just haven't invested the time yet. Some people get lucky this way, but even then, getting an appointment with your family Dr can take many weeks, appointment times can be inconvenient (mid afternoon, etc), so I'd rather make the investment of seeing someone at a private clinic, where I can have an appointment at 8:30am within a couple days.

I contrast all this with the fact that I was born and lived in South Africa well into my mid 20's. South Africa has abysmal public healthcare, and being born into a white middle class family, thanks to my parents I had access to private healthcare.

Private insurance in South Africa is less exploitative than in the U.S. Much less fighting with insurers to pay for coverage etc. Access to most Dr's is swift, and most procedure's are well covered. Obviously the overall experience compared to Canadian healthcare was much better, but the S.A private system only barely covers 20% of the population's needs and even with the disparity in wait times for service, the Canadian healthcare system at 100% coverage feels like an undeniable success, and a model that needs to be improved and iterated upon.

The debate around healthcare is tough here. Health issues and frustration with waiting can easily escalate the egocentric side of our human nature, but even with my negative experiences I would never denounce this system, because the broader social contract that has been written is valiant, and the price paid for this is worth it.

Nobody should be financially ruined because of health issues.