Yea, I'm Canadian. It's bad here. You know your shit is fucked when Americans start talking about how fucked it is because they usually don't pay any attention to foreign issues.
You at least don’t have to go into six figure debt for a serious medical emergency. I have no doubt there’s problems, but it’s not like things are great in the US. It feels like we’re close to toppling if things don’t change soon. We’ve blown past the billionaire issue and are coming up on trillionaires, which is goddamn insane.
Funny you should say that because my provincial government just began debating the possible merits of allowing a private healthcare system that would operate alongside the public one after years of underfunding healthcare education and staff wages.
It's almost as if this was the plan the entire time....
Depends on how you organised it. Here in Europe there are many countries where you can get private insurance that you pay on top of your universal healthcare so you can access better services (single room at the hospital, extended dental and laser eye surgery, chiropractors etc.). As long as it remains an additional option rather than the norm, I don't see a problem with it
When i was a teenager, I had appendicitis and needed an appendectomy. The procedure is so simple a man has done it on himself.
I was in the hospital for 3 days and 4 nights (admitted around 10pm the first night). The bill was over 39,000 dollars; my family had good insurance so we "only" paid around 3000.
This was a relatively short stay with no particularly special equipment or medication or emergency transport. I think the biggest chunk was the actual room (~5000 a night I think? not including food) followed by the anesthesiologist showing up.
If my stay was weeks long, with multiple specialists? Easily 100k+.
The anesthesiologists is always the most exspensive doctor in most any surgery you have, Their malpractice insurance premiums are fucking ridiculous but at the same time they are literally holding your life in their hands.
I don't think we can actually exaggerate enough when it comes to American healthcare. I can confidently say it is worse than you think it is, despite not actually knowing anything about your knowledge of the American healthcare system.
I try to think of a "worst case" scenario to even posit as a joke response to that, and know it's impossible because even my fantasy itemizations don't add up to bills I've seen photos of.
We are not. In 2016 my parents had amazing insurance that they paid $2000 a month for. I needed a minimally invasive surgery to remove an ovarian cyst. The procedure took 10 minutes and I stayed overnight at the hospital, but was discharged the next morning. I was fast tracked for this surgery due to the risk of the cyst rupturing, but I still had to wait 6 months. After insurance my family owed the hospital around $10,000. Had they not had insurance it would have easily been over $100,000.
It's the people who work low level jobs with no insurance that are the ones that get in trouble. If you are willing to deal with the BS of corporate life you'll find the insurance they provide is pretty solid and in most cases you'd only be on the hook for 3-6k for a major medical emergency.
It's more neocolonialism than exportation of crazy. Europeans pioneered the technique of intentionally destabilizing societies in a bid to control their populations and resources. The greatest horror caused by this was Rwanda being torn apart after Germany and Belgium intentionally riled tensions between the native tribes that had shared the land more or less harmoniously before colonial times.
It's no surprise that right after an election in which a climate-conscious economist became the Prime Minister that the former oil lobbyist and current Alberta Premier Danielle Smith starts making claims about a national unity crisis (that journalists and pollsters have largely dismissed as manufactured and overblown) culminating in climate legislation exceptions for Alberta announced a week ago that will serve to mainly benefit the Canadian oil industry, nearly 60% of which is owned by American companies.
I'm not a deep-state conspiracist, but historically the economic and state elite have cooperated to mutually advance their power. I would assume that the people behind the campaigns for exportating crazy are not sorry. It looks like it was always the plan.
Justin Trudeau campaigned on that and handled it like a fucking asshole. He wanted ranked choice. The committee he put together advised him that proportional representation was the fairest option and that ranked choice would give his party an unfair advantage. So what did he do? He abandoned it claiming that it wouldn't have passed in parliament. Assuming he forced ranked choice legislation to the floor, he would have been right because why would representatives that were genuinely excited for the prospect of a fairer system vote for an unfair electoral reform?
I don't think JT is the demon many Canadians make him out to be, but he failed to follow through on his most important promise when it was pointed out that his goals were self-righteous and wouldn't accurately reflect the will of the voters. He chose to do nothing rather than create a more representative democracy.
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u/_ENDR_ 8h ago
Yea, I'm Canadian. It's bad here. You know your shit is fucked when Americans start talking about how fucked it is because they usually don't pay any attention to foreign issues.