Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Canadian Health Care System

Hi all my Canadian friends,

I'm in a heated debate with an "expert" doctor back here in the states. I have a couple of questions for you:

1. Would any of you give up your health care system for one like we have in the states? And why?

2. Is there really an 18 month waiting or ever has been an 18 month waiting list to get any surgery? Or is that some number he pulled out of his "expert" @$$?

3. How much paperwork do you need to go thru to get your health care bills paid?

4. What percent (generally) of your income do you spend on health insurance?

5. Any other advantages of your system I may not be aware of that you care to share?

Thanks so much in advance!!!!

Health care is provincial, so it differs a lot from province to province. For Quebec, answers would be:

1. No, improve it maybe, but not replace it. Mostly because it is available to everyone.

2. No. Surgeries that can wait (no discomfort, no danger to life...) may have in certain cases that long a wait, but it is not usually unduely long. I do not have stats under my hand.

3. Public insurance (goverment sponsored): none at all (you go at your drugstore and the drugstore bills you (minimal) and the bulk of the bill goes to governement. For private insurances, some have that service (cost the same as public one) or a little less and then you have to fill a 2 minutes form.

4. Hard to compute since it is moslty through income taxes. The additional health care insurances (dental, meds and so on) amount (for me) at about 0.8% of my net salary.

5. I would have to study more for that one.

Thanks for the response EF! I'm being called a moron and just wanted to double check to see if maybe that's true. Don't answer that please!!!!

Any idea as to how to improve it?

Out here in Alberta we do pay a Health care premium opposed to it being factored into taxes. As a family we pay only (not sure exactly as my employer pays it for me), something like $90/month. This only includes family doctors and hospitals. Eye doctors/Dentists are paid by yourself or third party insurance as well as meds.

I wouldn't trade our system in for any other, if we would just pay our doctors closer to what they get down there we might be able to hang on to them longer, this is what is causing some of the wait times.

Any serious matters are looked at right away which does mean you could wait months or years for some non life threatening surgeries. I know of one person that waited 10 months for knee surgery but she wasn't in constant pain and had a desk job, the injury didn't affect her life style much.

Thanks Jason. It looks like I'm less of moron than I thought. Again, please don't respond to that.

Very true, I can't tell you the number of Physcians fron Canada I've met that practice in the states for the income.

But then wouldn't you end up paying the same amount for health care as we do? I mean not factoring in all the waste of money that the duplication of services that insurance companies cause?

The costs would certainly be closer. There are still other efficiencies that come with universality, plus the provincial governments seem to have pretty significant clout when negotiating drug prices as well.

The one thing our health care system hasn't figured out yet is how to let people pay extra for even better service while feeding that extra money back into the general system, ie without splitting into a public/private system.

Overall, though, I have been *very* impressed with our health care system. With a few exceptions, it seems to be "cheap in the right places" but spends money where it's needed. It makes effective use of (generally small) private companies where they make sense but doesn't dump big expensive operations like hospitals into the for-profit sector.

I do believe that having a universal health care system (implemented properly) can be quite a bit more efficient than the multiple levels of administration you need for a more complex system where employers and HMOs have to be in the loop as well. Some of the proposals being bandied around in the US do *not* seem to be real well conceived -- forcing universality onto the cyrrent private system is missing part of the point -- that the simplification resulting from universality can result in improved efficiency, not just "covering everyone".

I'm in Ontario, btw.

Thanks for the response Bridgman.

Those are really great points!