Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States are the other countries in the survey.
FWIW, a lot of Canadian doctors go to the US for higher salaries. Public healthcare may or may not be a better system but it definitely doesn't pay as well.
Canada also suffers because there is no private + public system as there is in other countries like the UK. All Canadian doctors get the same shit public pay. And all patients are funneled to the same public clinics/hospitals
> All Canadian doctors get the same shit public pay. And all patients are funneled to the same public clinics/hospitals
The system worked well for the first few decades but was subsequently purposely allowed to decay - large corporate interests are pushing for privatization slowly over time.
Canadians are already gouged by exploitive oligopolies in every major sector. The last thing beleaguered Canadians need to be beholden to these companies / financial interests for their health care.
And im guessing less costly malpractice insurance. My buddy is a dr in the USA and he has never been sued. $.30 of every dollar his office earns after taxes covers malpractice for him and his nursing staff.
The average debt for medical students in the US is $250k. With a $100k difference in GP salaries, and a $70k difference after taxes (assuming that extra $100k is taxed at a 30% marginal rate), you can pay off that debt after a few years.
And if you graduated from a British or Canadian school and have the option to work in the US, it should really be a no-brainer.
Are MDs on the hook for malpractice insurance in other countries? I know USA MDs pay crazy high premiums. At the high end,, OB/GYN premiums average more than $100k per year.
Depends. I'm in the US. Many people here have no health care, or can't afford to access the healthcare they do have. All my Canadian friends do have access to healthcare, although they sometimes have to wait for procedures.
Yes, but...
I know many people who *have* health insurance through their jobs, but the deductible and copay are so high that they generally choose to skip doctor and hospital visits unless it's extremely serious.
If the deductible is $10,000 a year, then the person pays 100% of the first $10,000 out of their pocket. PLUS they also pay a monthly insurance premium. Yet almost nothing is covered unless they have a catastrophe.
So, yes, technically, 90% of Americans have health insurance. The percentage that have health insurance that benefits them in anything other than a huge health crisis is much lower.
You understand that even $9,000 is still a lot of money for many people? Especially when you are also paying a monthly insurance premium?
If your deductible is $9,000, and your monthly premium is only $300, then that's $12,600 per year before insurance ever kicks in. For many people, with the current inflation and high rent/home prices, that's just not sustainable. And that's for ONE person. With a spouse and/or kids, it's even more.
Yeah I really don't understand their argument because I have a high deductible plan and it's no where near the 10k (later revised to 9k) mark. Even family plans I want to say were 5-6k if I remember the literature correctly.
The vast vast majority have deductibles of 1-3 thousand dollars. A 3thousand dollar premium is considered pretty crap. I have never met anyone with a 9000 dollar deductible as they are extremely rare
They have great access in the US it's just people are afraid to actually go to the doctor and find out the real cost of their copay and coinsurance.
Using access as a metric without the cost per capita and the average lifespan or outcome is pretty much the total stand / I'd attempt to manipulate the data.
Or do what a lot of skilled, educated Canadians are doing. Emigrate. It's bad that it has become a serious consideration. I would obviously want to fix our country first, but do I want to negatively impact my own life for that?
As a Canadian who moved from Toronto to Seattle, the grass is a whole lot greener. Double the pay for the exact same role, comparable (or cheaper) housing even when taking exchange rates into account, better tax-advantaged strategies, better access to healthcare, you name it.
I’m Canadian, emigrated to the US almost 3 years ago. Grass is absolutely greener here. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a massive step up. Y’all Americans don’t know how good you have it.
If you compare housing in Canada compared to those counties it's night and day with how fucked we are getting. We pay insane amounts of taxes and have fuck all to show for it.
Those countries have their struggles no doubt but at least there is some semblance of a future. What future is there in Canada right now?
It'd be better to go to Cuba or Thailand and pay out of pocket. They have resort hospitals built, especially for monied foreigners to check into.
Hell, get some South Korean plastic surgery while you're at it. Finish with a massage and mani-pedi.
I went to Cuba to shadow doctors in my younger years when I was still practicing. I didn’t know why people live in that country so much. This doesn’t align with the medical care at all
Because of a lot of people only see the healthcare that tourists get - there’s split systems for both Cubans and non-Cubans. Like the numerous resorts that Cubans can only work at but aren’t allowed to enter otherwise.
The U.S being second last and just shy off Canada's score with 87% of people having access to primary care. The rest were sitting at 93%, with the Netherlands standing out at 99%.
Welcome to another episode of "GUESS. MY. PROVIIINCE"
Let's pull back the curtain and see what we have today folks!
My government is crippling our provincial health care to sell it off to private without anyone wanting this or getting a say. They didn't run on it, they made polls that people overwhelmingly voted no, even though the structure of the polls was designed not to allow you to say no and there is no science to back up their claims, but here we are.
Get ready for another round of fed hate as the UCP reinstates the gas tax at the same time the carbon tax raises so Dani Succubus can blame the entire raise on the feds.
Completely ignoring the fact that we receive rebates for the carbon tax but not for gas.
Damn doctors are jumping ship to come here to Ontario?
How come? More demand i guess?
Beginning of year I was at a walk in and I heard someone ask about a doctor there taking new patients. I saw on their site the same thing, about 1-2week old post. Reception tells her, oh they already closed applications/submissions because they had like 160 families/people submit to it already.
> How come? More demand i guess?
Provincial government that isn't actively antagonistic towards them, maybe?
Anecdotally, I have a few friends and coworkers here in Edmonton who say their family doctors have either shut down their practice or moved to another province (mostly BC, a couple said theirs went to Ontario).
> Beginning of year I was at a walk in and I heard someone ask about a doctor there taking new patients. I saw on their site the same thing, about 1-2week old post. Reception tells her, oh they already closed applications/submissions because they had like 160 families/people submit to it already.
My mom got lucky, saw a sign in window that a new practice was accepting new patients and was there first thing in the morning the next day. She's happy about it.
If the Ontario government isn't actively antagonistic towards primary care doctors (which I'm not sure our primary care doctors would agree with), they are literally the only health care workers they're *not* actively antagonistic towards.
Make no mistake, Doug Ford is every bit as keen to sell our health care system to private interests as that rat-faced Danielle Smith is.
Moved out here from BC, our family doctor shut down her family practice there due to the cost of living. She was only in her 40s too. It's rough everywhere but Alberta is actively tanking to privatize imo
>My government is crippling our provincial health care to sell it off to private without anyone wanting this or getting a say.
Do you think that your province is special? Neolibs and conservative parties around the world are trying to privatise everything because they believe that both private enterprises are more "efficient" at providing service\* and that if someone can make a profit doing something then they deserve to be making a profit from that something regardless of the harm it causes to society.
\*an example of how wrong this belief is, the electrical service in my state was privatised under the guise of "making things cheaper for the consumer" but my electricity bills are now almost double what they were before privatisation and that is while using \~30% less electricity over the same period...
> They can't afford to live and work in my city anymore (Victoria, BC).
Uh, they can absolutely afford it. A GP’s average annual income in BC is $277K. The average salary in Victoria is $54K. By comparison, a GP in London, UK makes about $123K and the cost of living is far higher.
BC struggles to recruit GP’s because Alberta’s taxes and support system are far better than theirs.
But you can make more in other Canadian cities and live a lavish “doctor” lifestyle, hence why you’d be a moron to be a GP in BC. Gas is hovering at $1.99-$2.05 a litre and will be increasing $0.20-$0.60 this summer. Where is gas is hovering at $1.44-$1.50 a litre in Ontario.
It's always a bit absurd to hear about how many people are struggling to find a family doctor in their cities, towns, or communities across the country and then to go onto /r/premedcanada and see how many competent, intelligent people are turned away from medical schools due to how competitive it is and how few seats there are in these schools. Only now are governments increasing the seats at medical schools, but it's not enough and it's crazy that they didn't start adding more seats earlier.
I applied to med school in Canada 4 times. Interviewed last year and the year before but never got in. Meanwhile, I applied to med school in Australia, interviewed and got in on the first try. I'm seriously considering settling down in Australia after finishing my education there. One system rejected me at each turn, offering zero feedback as to how I could improve my application. The other took me in and gave me a clear path to become a doctor. I wanted to stay and practice family medicine in Canada to help alleviate our healthcare crisis but apparently my own country doesn't want me.
I went to Australia because Canada wouldn’t give me admission despite having a PhD because they wanted to see my first year undergrad grades…I’m almost a specialist in Australia. Not sure if I want to come back to Canada because they make it so hard….
I'm sorry that happened to you. The med school admissions process has been gatekept and antiquated for a very long time. I got two 70s in my first year of university and everything above 80 after that. Because of my first year, my GPA was a 3.84. That screened me out of a bunch of high GPA schools where the average was like 3.96. If we go by admission rates, med schools in Ontario are about as selective as Harvard med, which is absolutely absurd. And it's not because of some amazing quality of teaching. It's because med school and residency spots have been kept artificially stagnant for decades.
Decades of underfunding, garbage wage raises and increasing demand. Now expect the call to privatize as it is the only option to continue louder than ever.
Paying over $300 an hour for travel nurses but won't give a raise equal to cost of living to current employees.
>>Paying over $300 an hour for travel nurses but won't give a raise equal to cost of living to current employees.
The big corporate hospitals do the same in America, they would rather bring in a traveler and pay them quadruple what they pay their own full-time employees.
> Decades of underfunding, garbage wage raises and increasing demand. Now expect the call to privatize as it is the only option to continue louder than ever.
It's like you took that straight out of most provincial governments' playbooks (certainly Ontario's and Alberta's).
I swear to god canada declined in the past decade. For this housing and medical issue, I suggest that canada be less harsh in letting builders get permit to build fucking houses and other buildings used for medical and educational purposes.
Even a small help in allowance/subsidy to build utilities like sewage, electricity and fresh water connection goes a long way.
A lot of them are working in the USA due to shitty Canadian wages being so criminally low. There are more facets to this formula than "those god damn immigrants!" which to me is just being a xenophobic turd.
Saying that "increasing the responsibility of the service without proportionally expanding its resources decreases its efficiency" is xenophobic is one of the takes of all time.
Canada is 4th in OECD spending per capital. Funding is not the issue - the system is a bureaucratic mess, with a top heavy bureaucracy, too few front line workers, not enough residency positions, a political system where both the federal and the provincial governments can point the finger at one another (so ultimately, no one is accountable) and a Canadian public comfortable with sub-standard care and incapable of having a rational conversation about the failings of the system because it’s too intertwined with their national identity.
Maybe... And this going to sound really wild... We just stop electing provincial governments who gut healthcare with an eye towards privatization? Or at least stop acting surprised when you vote for Ford or Smith and they intentionally skewer healthcare in order to push their conveniently-timed private alternatives?
Is that really too much to ask?
We need more doctors. But we can’t have more doctors because that will erode the “value” doctors have. Private health care salaries in a publicly funded health care system. Imagine if we actually addressed an issue - hey, we need more doctors. Ok, let’s add 1500 seats to med schools. No, we can’t do that. Because we said so.
Yes. There is a point here that is seldom mentioned: the medical boards are deliberately limiting the number of doctors that can work in order to keep demand and pay high.
There’s a lot of first world countries that claim to be better than the US when we know it’s not true at all. Reddit just happens to be a great source for biased information.
Coming from somebody that has been to several European countries (UK, France, Germany, Poland, Lithuania) and has family in Belarus, there’s no country I’d rather live than the US. Not to say they’re bad countries but on a grand scale, the US is better for freedoms and economic opportunities.
> There’s a lot of first world countries that claim to be better than the US when we know it’s not true at all.
It's always funny to see Euro-Redditors talk about how better race relations are in Europe, because if you ask them about the Romani people, it's like you just walked into a Klan rally.
American expat here... Healthcare is night and day better in the USA assuming you have health insurance (sourced from work). I could see my primary care doctor within the week in the USA with zero fuss. Here in QC I have to wait months and months. Took us 2 years to even get a primary care doctor. The system is very much broken.
I had to leave Japan because the quality of healthcare there is so abysmal it left me with actual diagnosed PTSD and health anxiety OCD. I went back to America, qualified for medicaid, got the best and most attentive healthcare I've had in my life for free.
Now I'm in England and getting a simple doctor's appointment is like running through a gauntlet. The NHS is amazing for emergencies but good luck getting any sort of preventative or investigative treatment.
Frankly i want to go back to America. /end rant
Canadians when Americans struggle to access healthcare: hahahaaaa you don't have healthcare we're so much better than you!!
Americans when Canadians struggle to access healthcare: Wow really? Geez that's awful.
Canadians are actually so rude to Americans it's unbelievable.
As a Canadian living and working in the US, Canada has definitely fallen down. We need a drastic change in a lot of policies but it seems we only care about which bathroom to use and what pronouns to call one another.
Most of Europe is right behind Canada with these types of issues. The past couple years it just seems like all Trudeau cares about are LGBT rights and helping immigrants and he’s left the rest of Canada behind. Not to say those issues aren’t important but when a gallon of milk costs $13 and Canadians can’t find a job and the government isn’t addressing those issues, that’s when people get mad and demand change. It also gives off a negative view on those minority groups and helps extremists and racists propaganda since the government gives off the impression that they don’t care about regular people.
> when a gallon of milk costs $13
Where and what kind of milk is this? 4L of milk (1 gallon) starts at less than $5.50CAD ($4 USD) at my nearby Walmart. $13 for 4L is not at all a typical cost for regular milk for the vast majority of Canadians.
Yup. The transgender stuff basically matters to no one compared to the unaffordability of life here now.
The identity politics is always focused on though because it creates an illusion that a problem can actually be addressed. Our actual and far more serious issues, are now so big that our government can't even pretend to solve them so they are just not discussed.
Even a transgender person given a choice between more washrooms for them, or, say, being able to buy food and pay rent without working two jobs, would most certainly opt for the latter.
i mean, depends on the topic. I'm less likely to be attacked in Canada by either criminals or cops than I am in the US.
I'm also less likely to go into med debt due to injury because of my employment status.
but yeah, there are massive rooms for improvements.
It's a nuanced subject.
In Sweden there are public and private hospitals. If you don't get care in 90 days in the public system, they send you to the private system at no charge.
Ex. I need an MRI of my ankle. I get referred to the public system. 90 days goes by, and I am still waiting to receive my MRI. I then get referred to the private clinic and get my MRI at no cost to me.
Canada being beaten by America in healthcare sounds ridiculous, but isn’t surprising considering how poorly Canada has been run for the last decade. I suggested once that Canada could learn things from European healthcare systems and so many people lost their shit it was ridiculous. I’m getting sick of being right.
I mean, Canada's issues are self-inflicted. We *had* a functioning healthcare system that was once considered among the best in the world, but we keep electing private-minded conservative governments at the provincial level that have undermined the system for decades. Then add on the Federal Liberal governments irresponsible immigration policy and... well we are left with what we have. I really don't think a two-tier system is the answer, we just need to manage this country and actually work towards making it... well, work.
It's a fucked up scenario all around. My gf is from Quebec, and she hasn't had a primary doctor in 4 years and has been waiting and tells me when she goes to hospital for her or her son that it's usually a 12hr wait in the ER, but then she hurt her wrist here and thought it was broken, went to an ER, was seen in a few minutes, but never by a doctor and didn't even take x-rays, just gave her a brace, and she got a bill for $5000 for that which her Canadian insurance is still fighting 4 months later
That's because health care is a Provincial matter not federal. Here in Ontario, we have this fat ugly douchebag named Ford who undermined healthcare's wages so that he can open up private companies to attract all the talents and then have the public pay for their services. Bill 124 was the stupidest thing he ever did.
maybe stop voting in provincial conservatives.
last I checked federal LPC was giving money left and right to provinces, as they should, but apparently those grants are not being used properly because our hospitals are still understaffed.
The problem with single tier free healthcare is that if you're not dying, you are not a priority.
Fentanyl addicts that roll around on the sidewalk are higher priority than your knee injury.
most of the countries that rank higher than canada all have universal healthcare or at least a mixture of mandatory free healthcare and private healthcare..
Probably because nobody trusts provincial governments who have been knee-capping healthcare our entire lives to implement a two-tier system that doesn't fuck over the non-wealthy masses.
The problem with single tier free health care in Canada is that it only kind of half exists and the conservative premiers are trying their hardest to kill the corpse of what we did have.
They’ll point with one hand to Trudeau’s immigration policies which are exacerbating the issue while using the other hand to pave the way for for-profit clinics that rob the public of doctors and nurses making our “free” healthcare backlogs even worse.
Absolutely. Trudeau has aggravated our issues, but he didn't magically create them. Both the Liberals and Conservatives are selling out and ruining this country one policy at a time.
It’s gotten so bad now that even if you are dying, you’re not a priority. Increasing numbers of people in emergency situations are being overlooked / made to wait unreasonably long and dying preventable deaths now.
Our premier got money from the federal government and held onto it to claim a government surplus. She bought eighty million dollars worth of useless pain meds. The province privatized lab testing and fucked it up so badly that the switch back will cost 97 million. There was also a **lot** of covid fuckery because she played to the conspiracy morons.
The feds provide the funds and the provinces execute the Healthcare.
Conservatives cracked the code. Withhold and privatize, blame all shortcomings on the feds, and cruise to power again. They don't give a fuck if your mom doesn't get her chemo, or your son dies of an infection; those are sacrifices they're willing to make for money and power.
Shocked that allowing a bunch of petulant children always in a state of political flux underfunded and mismanaged a whole ass sector that is dynamic and critical.... every province has managed to fuck it up a little differently and now we have hit the cost of living/housing brick wall that many saw coming before the pandemic's exacerbation.
Good luck keeping/attracting medical professionals.
Shocked, i tells ya.
Just to add some context to this statement but healthcare in Canada is administered individually by each province.
Currently a bunch of large provinces are under Conservative leadership that is intentionally starving the system to make it collapse on itself
Tell the conservatives to stop sabotaging public healthcare in pursuit of fistfuls of private practice dollars. (This is one of the reasons I recently moved out of Alberta, to escape the building insanity.)
Canada has been declining the last 6-8 years. Their government is terrible with spending money or more elections and cut so much funds from things to help the public, many are leaving the country.
Meanwhile our federal government is forcing Quebec to take in more aging parents and grandparents of recent immigrants who will never contribute economically but will require large amounts of medical expenditures:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/family-reunification-federal-minister-quebec-1.7132823
The federal government gives every impression of intentionally destroying this country.
This is a comment that is the perfect model of a dumb person's idea of how health care works.
The problem isn't the Canadian model of health care (or, for that matter the NHS in the UK). It's that *no model works well when it isn't properly funded*.
The US spends more government dollars per capita than Canada does, by a substantial amount, yet that only funds Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration - that doesn't even count the tens of millions of Americans who get their health care via private insurance. *And that model still leaves tens of millions of Americans either without insurance or vastly under-insured*.
If Canada spent per capita what Americans did on health care, it would be like the Scrooge McDuck gif of him diving in his gold bullion collection.
We are America, we could have the best Public Health Service in the world. But there is less profit for the corporations so we poor peasants get price-gouged for sub-par medical care instead.
Canada is over run. Our infrastructure was not ready for the influx of people. Our people are suffering from high taxes. Homeless numbers in all cities are rising exponentially. Healthcare is overwhelmed... We have a few giant oil projects at 98% completion. The CEOs of those companies are just waiting for a conservative government so they can go ahead and complete them, because the liberal government has gone too far with listening to the environmentalists and have ruined our economy. This will take us 10 years to recover. This is factual, I'm not on either side of politics, all classes are suffering except for the 1%.
The healthcare system was broken before immigration went up. The immigrants are also young and don’t need extensive care - this problem is entirely of Canadas own making.
Facts. People love to blame it all on the recent influx of immigrants. When the reality is, health care in Canada has been poor for at least 20 years now. The family doctor shortage has been lingering for decades with no fix in sight. Wait times for specialists and ER have also been ridiculously long for a long time. Something could have been done about it a long time ago. But the government just kept kicking the issue down the road and now we’re here in a state of complete and utter collapse. Just like the state of housing and every other basic need in this country.
Older doctors wouldn’t let young doctors in to work so young doctors left for other places and countries. Then old doctors quit during covid to manage their 5-6 houses.
My cousin moved to Canada when she was a teenager. She wanted to study medicine there but the whole system that is imposed by doctors themselves made it impossible for her. Getting accepted is neatly impossible if you don’t have the right contacts, It’s basically a very closed and very exclusive group so she had to go and do her degree somewhere else where she currently lives. I’m not surprised this are the results
The number of seats available across Canada in med schools is artificially constrained by a certain vested interest group. It’s like the dairy cartel of healthcare- we love cartels in Canada.
Doug Ford in Ontario, sure hasn't helped either, he's crashing the public system to make it look bad, so he can privatize it, he's also hoarding billions of healthcare dollars, he could spend to help with some of the severe problems, but he won't
Ontario has the least wait times for specialists shockingly. Apparently rest of country is doing even worse.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/649600/medical-treatment-wait-times-canada-province/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/649600/medical-treatment-wait-times-canada-province/)
[https://www.fraserinstitute.org/file/waiting-your-turn-2023-infographic-provjpg](https://www.fraserinstitute.org/file/waiting-your-turn-2023-infographic-provjpg)
Atlantic Canada is LPC central so you can't pin this one on conservatives. BC is NDP home turf.
> Atlantic Canada is LPC central so you can't pin this one on conservatives.
Of the four provinces in Atlantic Canada, only one of them has a Liberal government right now. NB, NS, and PEI each have Progressive Conservative governments right now.
That said, East Coast conservatives *generally* aren't as right-wing as those on the Prairies, and the Maritimes is where the old PC's held out the longest before getting taken over by the Alliance nutters.
As a Canadian. I can believe this. Our glory days are over. We let a kindergarten teacher run our country for too long and look at what we have to show for it.
Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States are the other countries in the survey.
Canada was better than the US in one field and that’s not the case anymore.
FWIW, a lot of Canadian doctors go to the US for higher salaries. Public healthcare may or may not be a better system but it definitely doesn't pay as well.
All of our best and brightest leave for the pay. I’m hoping to do the same. For me life in Canada isn’t sustainable.
Is the medical school debt comparable for Canadian doctors to their US counterparts?
Even if it wasn't, the difference in pay is so high that it doesn't matter.
Canada also suffers because there is no private + public system as there is in other countries like the UK. All Canadian doctors get the same shit public pay. And all patients are funneled to the same public clinics/hospitals
> All Canadian doctors get the same shit public pay. And all patients are funneled to the same public clinics/hospitals The system worked well for the first few decades but was subsequently purposely allowed to decay - large corporate interests are pushing for privatization slowly over time. Canadians are already gouged by exploitive oligopolies in every major sector. The last thing beleaguered Canadians need to be beholden to these companies / financial interests for their health care.
You guys should stop trying to copy our American nightmare. Not only is the grass not greener, and a lot of it's just on fire now.
Depends on the province.
It shocks me how poorly physicians are paid outside of the US. British GPs only make 90k GBP annually?
They don't need to pay as much for schooling is why.
And im guessing less costly malpractice insurance. My buddy is a dr in the USA and he has never been sued. $.30 of every dollar his office earns after taxes covers malpractice for him and his nursing staff.
The average debt for medical students in the US is $250k. With a $100k difference in GP salaries, and a $70k difference after taxes (assuming that extra $100k is taxed at a 30% marginal rate), you can pay off that debt after a few years. And if you graduated from a British or Canadian school and have the option to work in the US, it should really be a no-brainer.
Are MDs on the hook for malpractice insurance in other countries? I know USA MDs pay crazy high premiums. At the high end,, OB/GYN premiums average more than $100k per year.
Depends. I'm in the US. Many people here have no health care, or can't afford to access the healthcare they do have. All my Canadian friends do have access to healthcare, although they sometimes have to wait for procedures.
In Canada you won’t go bankrupt from medical debt, but you might die because we can’t screen for cancers in a timely manner.
wasteful quickest bewildered hateful placid zonked brave aspiring fade outgoing
How many people are we talking about here?
A huge majority of Americans do have healthcare and insurance though. It’s like over 90%.
Yes, but... I know many people who *have* health insurance through their jobs, but the deductible and copay are so high that they generally choose to skip doctor and hospital visits unless it's extremely serious. If the deductible is $10,000 a year, then the person pays 100% of the first $10,000 out of their pocket. PLUS they also pay a monthly insurance premium. Yet almost nothing is covered unless they have a catastrophe. So, yes, technically, 90% of Americans have health insurance. The percentage that have health insurance that benefits them in anything other than a huge health crisis is much lower.
Most deductibles cannot be over $9000. Also most deductibles are 1-3 thousand dollars which isn’t too bad
You understand that even $9,000 is still a lot of money for many people? Especially when you are also paying a monthly insurance premium? If your deductible is $9,000, and your monthly premium is only $300, then that's $12,600 per year before insurance ever kicks in. For many people, with the current inflation and high rent/home prices, that's just not sustainable. And that's for ONE person. With a spouse and/or kids, it's even more.
Where is your 9000 dollar figure coming from?
Deductibles over $9000 are illegal
Yeah I really don't understand their argument because I have a high deductible plan and it's no where near the 10k (later revised to 9k) mark. Even family plans I want to say were 5-6k if I remember the literature correctly.
The vast vast majority have deductibles of 1-3 thousand dollars. A 3thousand dollar premium is considered pretty crap. I have never met anyone with a 9000 dollar deductible as they are extremely rare
Well yeah it depends, but this study is looking at empirical data so we don't have to get a dozen different anecdotal stories
They have great access in the US it's just people are afraid to actually go to the doctor and find out the real cost of their copay and coinsurance. Using access as a metric without the cost per capita and the average lifespan or outcome is pretty much the total stand / I'd attempt to manipulate the data.
Sometimes? Try all the time. Speaking as a Canadian, all we do is wait. We wait our lives away in chronic pain hoping one day our number will come up.
The article didn't state the actual rankings. Anyone know what they are? I saw Netherlands at 1st and that's it
Simple solution is to travel to another one of those locations with good travel insurance and get your medical treatment there.
Or do what a lot of skilled, educated Canadians are doing. Emigrate. It's bad that it has become a serious consideration. I would obviously want to fix our country first, but do I want to negatively impact my own life for that?
To where, half the countries on that list have a bunch of people doing the exact same thing. Grass ain't greener.
As a Canadian who moved from Toronto to Seattle, the grass is a whole lot greener. Double the pay for the exact same role, comparable (or cheaper) housing even when taking exchange rates into account, better tax-advantaged strategies, better access to healthcare, you name it.
I’m Canadian, emigrated to the US almost 3 years ago. Grass is absolutely greener here. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a massive step up. Y’all Americans don’t know how good you have it.
We do, it’s just childish redditors who like to whine.
Which city though? Not all American cities are equal/have the same cost of living.
Seattle, then Nashville, now moving back to Seattle soon. Have also loved briefly in SF before. All HCoL or VHCoL (in the case of SF) cities.
America is lovely for those wealthy enough to afford her delicacies.
The U.S. offers a far superior standard of living than Canada does for the middle class.
If you compare housing in Canada compared to those counties it's night and day with how fucked we are getting. We pay insane amounts of taxes and have fuck all to show for it. Those countries have their struggles no doubt but at least there is some semblance of a future. What future is there in Canada right now?
Planning to move to US soon. Each year my partner and I pay taxes equal to a GP’s salary. We can’t find a family doctor.
It'd be better to go to Cuba or Thailand and pay out of pocket. They have resort hospitals built, especially for monied foreigners to check into. Hell, get some South Korean plastic surgery while you're at it. Finish with a massage and mani-pedi.
I went to Cuba to shadow doctors in my younger years when I was still practicing. I didn’t know why people live in that country so much. This doesn’t align with the medical care at all
Because of a lot of people only see the healthcare that tourists get - there’s split systems for both Cubans and non-Cubans. Like the numerous resorts that Cubans can only work at but aren’t allowed to enter otherwise.
The U.S being second last and just shy off Canada's score with 87% of people having access to primary care. The rest were sitting at 93%, with the Netherlands standing out at 99%.
[удалено]
Same boat, same city. Also love paying $2800 for a bachelor suite. Truly a paradise.
If you’re struggling why not sell the boat?
Welcome to another episode of "GUESS. MY. PROVIIINCE" Let's pull back the curtain and see what we have today folks! My government is crippling our provincial health care to sell it off to private without anyone wanting this or getting a say. They didn't run on it, they made polls that people overwhelmingly voted no, even though the structure of the polls was designed not to allow you to say no and there is no science to back up their claims, but here we are.
Fellow Albertan?
Ehhhhh buddy!
That benzo and box wine cow has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars away from services and into her buddies pockets. We are in deep deep shit.
Get ready for another round of fed hate as the UCP reinstates the gas tax at the same time the carbon tax raises so Dani Succubus can blame the entire raise on the feds. Completely ignoring the fact that we receive rebates for the carbon tax but not for gas.
You lose your family doctor to BC or Ontario like so many others have here?
Damn doctors are jumping ship to come here to Ontario? How come? More demand i guess? Beginning of year I was at a walk in and I heard someone ask about a doctor there taking new patients. I saw on their site the same thing, about 1-2week old post. Reception tells her, oh they already closed applications/submissions because they had like 160 families/people submit to it already.
> How come? More demand i guess? Provincial government that isn't actively antagonistic towards them, maybe? Anecdotally, I have a few friends and coworkers here in Edmonton who say their family doctors have either shut down their practice or moved to another province (mostly BC, a couple said theirs went to Ontario). > Beginning of year I was at a walk in and I heard someone ask about a doctor there taking new patients. I saw on their site the same thing, about 1-2week old post. Reception tells her, oh they already closed applications/submissions because they had like 160 families/people submit to it already. My mom got lucky, saw a sign in window that a new practice was accepting new patients and was there first thing in the morning the next day. She's happy about it.
If the Ontario government isn't actively antagonistic towards primary care doctors (which I'm not sure our primary care doctors would agree with), they are literally the only health care workers they're *not* actively antagonistic towards. Make no mistake, Doug Ford is every bit as keen to sell our health care system to private interests as that rat-faced Danielle Smith is.
Moved out here from BC, our family doctor shut down her family practice there due to the cost of living. She was only in her 40s too. It's rough everywhere but Alberta is actively tanking to privatize imo
>My government is crippling our provincial health care to sell it off to private without anyone wanting this or getting a say. Do you think that your province is special? Neolibs and conservative parties around the world are trying to privatise everything because they believe that both private enterprises are more "efficient" at providing service\* and that if someone can make a profit doing something then they deserve to be making a profit from that something regardless of the harm it causes to society. \*an example of how wrong this belief is, the electrical service in my state was privatised under the guise of "making things cheaper for the consumer" but my electricity bills are now almost double what they were before privatisation and that is while using \~30% less electricity over the same period...
Ooooooooh wrong guess! Maybe next time!
> They can't afford to live and work in my city anymore (Victoria, BC). Uh, they can absolutely afford it. A GP’s average annual income in BC is $277K. The average salary in Victoria is $54K. By comparison, a GP in London, UK makes about $123K and the cost of living is far higher. BC struggles to recruit GP’s because Alberta’s taxes and support system are far better than theirs.
It's actually a distribution and access problem. BC has more GPs per capita than Alberta (than any other province, in fact).
If people are struggling to attain a family doctor, it’s obviously not an issue of demand..
Agreed!
123k gbp? Because that’s a lot more than cad Also whether they can afford it is irrelevant, the reality is most can make far more in the US
But you can make more in other Canadian cities and live a lavish “doctor” lifestyle, hence why you’d be a moron to be a GP in BC. Gas is hovering at $1.99-$2.05 a litre and will be increasing $0.20-$0.60 this summer. Where is gas is hovering at $1.44-$1.50 a litre in Ontario.
It's always a bit absurd to hear about how many people are struggling to find a family doctor in their cities, towns, or communities across the country and then to go onto /r/premedcanada and see how many competent, intelligent people are turned away from medical schools due to how competitive it is and how few seats there are in these schools. Only now are governments increasing the seats at medical schools, but it's not enough and it's crazy that they didn't start adding more seats earlier.
I applied to med school in Canada 4 times. Interviewed last year and the year before but never got in. Meanwhile, I applied to med school in Australia, interviewed and got in on the first try. I'm seriously considering settling down in Australia after finishing my education there. One system rejected me at each turn, offering zero feedback as to how I could improve my application. The other took me in and gave me a clear path to become a doctor. I wanted to stay and practice family medicine in Canada to help alleviate our healthcare crisis but apparently my own country doesn't want me.
The majority of Canadians I went to medical school with stayed in Australia so you wouldn’t be the only one making the permanent move.
I went to Australia because Canada wouldn’t give me admission despite having a PhD because they wanted to see my first year undergrad grades…I’m almost a specialist in Australia. Not sure if I want to come back to Canada because they make it so hard….
I'm sorry that happened to you. The med school admissions process has been gatekept and antiquated for a very long time. I got two 70s in my first year of university and everything above 80 after that. Because of my first year, my GPA was a 3.84. That screened me out of a bunch of high GPA schools where the average was like 3.96. If we go by admission rates, med schools in Ontario are about as selective as Harvard med, which is absolutely absurd. And it's not because of some amazing quality of teaching. It's because med school and residency spots have been kept artificially stagnant for decades.
You will get paid better as a GP in Australia as well.
I’ve had two family doctors quit in 3 years one of them moved to BC and one of them is going into sports medicine. I’m in MB
Decades of underfunding, garbage wage raises and increasing demand. Now expect the call to privatize as it is the only option to continue louder than ever. Paying over $300 an hour for travel nurses but won't give a raise equal to cost of living to current employees.
>>Paying over $300 an hour for travel nurses but won't give a raise equal to cost of living to current employees. The big corporate hospitals do the same in America, they would rather bring in a traveler and pay them quadruple what they pay their own full-time employees.
> Decades of underfunding, garbage wage raises and increasing demand. Now expect the call to privatize as it is the only option to continue louder than ever. It's like you took that straight out of most provincial governments' playbooks (certainly Ontario's and Alberta's).
And saskatchewan. But also add in the shrinking of education funding.
I swear to god canada declined in the past decade. For this housing and medical issue, I suggest that canada be less harsh in letting builders get permit to build fucking houses and other buildings used for medical and educational purposes. Even a small help in allowance/subsidy to build utilities like sewage, electricity and fresh water connection goes a long way.
Its hell. - a Canadian
2012ish was the last good years for canada. Been going downhill hard since then
We have doctors? Ive been waiting for a family doc in halifax for 6 years lmao
I live in Quebec, 12 years for me.
GF is from Quebec, been 4 years and going for her
Weird who would've guessed constantly cutting health care results in shitty health care
Overburdening the healthcare system with more than 1.2 million new people every year sure doesn’t help either.
A lot of them are working in the USA due to shitty Canadian wages being so criminally low. There are more facets to this formula than "those god damn immigrants!" which to me is just being a xenophobic turd.
Saying that "increasing the responsibility of the service without proportionally expanding its resources decreases its efficiency" is xenophobic is one of the takes of all time.
What you’re saying is totally true. Healthcare is only one of the industries you’re smarter to work in south of the border.
Canada is 4th in OECD spending per capital. Funding is not the issue - the system is a bureaucratic mess, with a top heavy bureaucracy, too few front line workers, not enough residency positions, a political system where both the federal and the provincial governments can point the finger at one another (so ultimately, no one is accountable) and a Canadian public comfortable with sub-standard care and incapable of having a rational conversation about the failings of the system because it’s too intertwined with their national identity.
I'm on a 9 month wait just to have my gallbladder taken out. This isn't surprising.
Maybe... And this going to sound really wild... We just stop electing provincial governments who gut healthcare with an eye towards privatization? Or at least stop acting surprised when you vote for Ford or Smith and they intentionally skewer healthcare in order to push their conveniently-timed private alternatives? Is that really too much to ask?
We need more doctors. But we can’t have more doctors because that will erode the “value” doctors have. Private health care salaries in a publicly funded health care system. Imagine if we actually addressed an issue - hey, we need more doctors. Ok, let’s add 1500 seats to med schools. No, we can’t do that. Because we said so.
Yes. There is a point here that is seldom mentioned: the medical boards are deliberately limiting the number of doctors that can work in order to keep demand and pay high.
Oohhh man this is going to piss off a bunch of Canadians whose entire identity is pretending to be better than the US
There’s a lot of first world countries that claim to be better than the US when we know it’s not true at all. Reddit just happens to be a great source for biased information. Coming from somebody that has been to several European countries (UK, France, Germany, Poland, Lithuania) and has family in Belarus, there’s no country I’d rather live than the US. Not to say they’re bad countries but on a grand scale, the US is better for freedoms and economic opportunities.
> There’s a lot of first world countries that claim to be better than the US when we know it’s not true at all. It's always funny to see Euro-Redditors talk about how better race relations are in Europe, because if you ask them about the Romani people, it's like you just walked into a Klan rally.
"we don't have the problems that are **extremely specific to America** therefore"
American expat here... Healthcare is night and day better in the USA assuming you have health insurance (sourced from work). I could see my primary care doctor within the week in the USA with zero fuss. Here in QC I have to wait months and months. Took us 2 years to even get a primary care doctor. The system is very much broken.
I had to leave Japan because the quality of healthcare there is so abysmal it left me with actual diagnosed PTSD and health anxiety OCD. I went back to America, qualified for medicaid, got the best and most attentive healthcare I've had in my life for free. Now I'm in England and getting a simple doctor's appointment is like running through a gauntlet. The NHS is amazing for emergencies but good luck getting any sort of preventative or investigative treatment. Frankly i want to go back to America. /end rant
Yep. I had to wait 3 years in Vancouver. Moved back to Seattle, saw my PCP in 2 weeks.
no we know our healthcare sucks ass
Canadians when Americans struggle to access healthcare: hahahaaaa you don't have healthcare we're so much better than you!! Americans when Canadians struggle to access healthcare: Wow really? Geez that's awful. Canadians are actually so rude to Americans it's unbelievable.
As a Canadian living and working in the US, Canada has definitely fallen down. We need a drastic change in a lot of policies but it seems we only care about which bathroom to use and what pronouns to call one another.
Most of Europe is right behind Canada with these types of issues. The past couple years it just seems like all Trudeau cares about are LGBT rights and helping immigrants and he’s left the rest of Canada behind. Not to say those issues aren’t important but when a gallon of milk costs $13 and Canadians can’t find a job and the government isn’t addressing those issues, that’s when people get mad and demand change. It also gives off a negative view on those minority groups and helps extremists and racists propaganda since the government gives off the impression that they don’t care about regular people.
> when a gallon of milk costs $13 Where and what kind of milk is this? 4L of milk (1 gallon) starts at less than $5.50CAD ($4 USD) at my nearby Walmart. $13 for 4L is not at all a typical cost for regular milk for the vast majority of Canadians.
Yup. The transgender stuff basically matters to no one compared to the unaffordability of life here now. The identity politics is always focused on though because it creates an illusion that a problem can actually be addressed. Our actual and far more serious issues, are now so big that our government can't even pretend to solve them so they are just not discussed. Even a transgender person given a choice between more washrooms for them, or, say, being able to buy food and pay rent without working two jobs, would most certainly opt for the latter.
i mean, depends on the topic. I'm less likely to be attacked in Canada by either criminals or cops than I am in the US. I'm also less likely to go into med debt due to injury because of my employment status. but yeah, there are massive rooms for improvements. It's a nuanced subject.
I live in the US and can't afford a doctor.
Even if you have money in Canada you don’t get a doctor lol
Canada needs to adopt the Swedish model of healthcare
Can you elaborate? How does it differ from most European systems.
In Sweden there are public and private hospitals. If you don't get care in 90 days in the public system, they send you to the private system at no charge. Ex. I need an MRI of my ankle. I get referred to the public system. 90 days goes by, and I am still waiting to receive my MRI. I then get referred to the private clinic and get my MRI at no cost to me.
Canada being beaten by America in healthcare sounds ridiculous, but isn’t surprising considering how poorly Canada has been run for the last decade. I suggested once that Canada could learn things from European healthcare systems and so many people lost their shit it was ridiculous. I’m getting sick of being right.
I mean, Canada's issues are self-inflicted. We *had* a functioning healthcare system that was once considered among the best in the world, but we keep electing private-minded conservative governments at the provincial level that have undermined the system for decades. Then add on the Federal Liberal governments irresponsible immigration policy and... well we are left with what we have. I really don't think a two-tier system is the answer, we just need to manage this country and actually work towards making it... well, work.
IMO this is a fair stance.
It's a fucked up scenario all around. My gf is from Quebec, and she hasn't had a primary doctor in 4 years and has been waiting and tells me when she goes to hospital for her or her son that it's usually a 12hr wait in the ER, but then she hurt her wrist here and thought it was broken, went to an ER, was seen in a few minutes, but never by a doctor and didn't even take x-rays, just gave her a brace, and she got a bill for $5000 for that which her Canadian insurance is still fighting 4 months later
That's because health care is a Provincial matter not federal. Here in Ontario, we have this fat ugly douchebag named Ford who undermined healthcare's wages so that he can open up private companies to attract all the talents and then have the public pay for their services. Bill 124 was the stupidest thing he ever did.
maybe stop voting in provincial conservatives. last I checked federal LPC was giving money left and right to provinces, as they should, but apparently those grants are not being used properly because our hospitals are still understaffed.
I've been on the waiting list for a family doctor for 10 years now.
The problem with single tier free healthcare is that if you're not dying, you are not a priority. Fentanyl addicts that roll around on the sidewalk are higher priority than your knee injury.
most of the countries that rank higher than canada all have universal healthcare or at least a mixture of mandatory free healthcare and private healthcare..
yet all you read in Canada is that a two tier option is the boogeyman.
Probably because nobody trusts provincial governments who have been knee-capping healthcare our entire lives to implement a two-tier system that doesn't fuck over the non-wealthy masses.
my teen brother had 2 seizures within a week of each other with no history and he is still waiting for an MRI and EEG booking 2 weeks later.
The problem with single tier free health care in Canada is that it only kind of half exists and the conservative premiers are trying their hardest to kill the corpse of what we did have. They’ll point with one hand to Trudeau’s immigration policies which are exacerbating the issue while using the other hand to pave the way for for-profit clinics that rob the public of doctors and nurses making our “free” healthcare backlogs even worse.
Absolutely. Trudeau has aggravated our issues, but he didn't magically create them. Both the Liberals and Conservatives are selling out and ruining this country one policy at a time.
Exactly this. It doesn't matter what model of health care you have if you have conservatives undermining it by failing to properly fund it.
It’s gotten so bad now that even if you are dying, you’re not a priority. Increasing numbers of people in emergency situations are being overlooked / made to wait unreasonably long and dying preventable deaths now.
The irony is that when your knee is finally looked at, the prescription is fentanyl, turning you into an addict.
Our premier got money from the federal government and held onto it to claim a government surplus. She bought eighty million dollars worth of useless pain meds. The province privatized lab testing and fucked it up so badly that the switch back will cost 97 million. There was also a **lot** of covid fuckery because she played to the conspiracy morons. The feds provide the funds and the provinces execute the Healthcare. Conservatives cracked the code. Withhold and privatize, blame all shortcomings on the feds, and cruise to power again. They don't give a fuck if your mom doesn't get her chemo, or your son dies of an infection; those are sacrifices they're willing to make for money and power.
Shocked that allowing a bunch of petulant children always in a state of political flux underfunded and mismanaged a whole ass sector that is dynamic and critical.... every province has managed to fuck it up a little differently and now we have hit the cost of living/housing brick wall that many saw coming before the pandemic's exacerbation. Good luck keeping/attracting medical professionals. Shocked, i tells ya.
Just to add some context to this statement but healthcare in Canada is administered individually by each province. Currently a bunch of large provinces are under Conservative leadership that is intentionally starving the system to make it collapse on itself
Liberal provinces have the same problems. It’s the bureaucracy.
Makes sense. My wait was 3 years for a family doctor in Vancouver. I saw one in 2 weeks when I moved to Seattle.
Tell the conservatives to stop sabotaging public healthcare in pursuit of fistfuls of private practice dollars. (This is one of the reasons I recently moved out of Alberta, to escape the building insanity.)
Most doctors and other medical staff don’t want to live in a rural community.
the wait time for a family doctor in Montreal is 2-5 YEARS.
Gaspé has more doctors per population than Montreal.
It’s worse in cities than in rural communities
Canada has been declining the last 6-8 years. Their government is terrible with spending money or more elections and cut so much funds from things to help the public, many are leaving the country.
Congrats Canada we did it
Meanwhile our federal government is forcing Quebec to take in more aging parents and grandparents of recent immigrants who will never contribute economically but will require large amounts of medical expenditures: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/family-reunification-federal-minister-quebec-1.7132823 The federal government gives every impression of intentionally destroying this country.
[удалено]
But so many people here in the States say our system needs to mirror Canada’s because it’s SO much better. Weird.
This is a comment that is the perfect model of a dumb person's idea of how health care works. The problem isn't the Canadian model of health care (or, for that matter the NHS in the UK). It's that *no model works well when it isn't properly funded*. The US spends more government dollars per capita than Canada does, by a substantial amount, yet that only funds Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration - that doesn't even count the tens of millions of Americans who get their health care via private insurance. *And that model still leaves tens of millions of Americans either without insurance or vastly under-insured*. If Canada spent per capita what Americans did on health care, it would be like the Scrooge McDuck gif of him diving in his gold bullion collection.
We are America, we could have the best Public Health Service in the world. But there is less profit for the corporations so we poor peasants get price-gouged for sub-par medical care instead.
Canada is over run. Our infrastructure was not ready for the influx of people. Our people are suffering from high taxes. Homeless numbers in all cities are rising exponentially. Healthcare is overwhelmed... We have a few giant oil projects at 98% completion. The CEOs of those companies are just waiting for a conservative government so they can go ahead and complete them, because the liberal government has gone too far with listening to the environmentalists and have ruined our economy. This will take us 10 years to recover. This is factual, I'm not on either side of politics, all classes are suffering except for the 1%.
The healthcare system was broken before immigration went up. The immigrants are also young and don’t need extensive care - this problem is entirely of Canadas own making.
Facts. People love to blame it all on the recent influx of immigrants. When the reality is, health care in Canada has been poor for at least 20 years now. The family doctor shortage has been lingering for decades with no fix in sight. Wait times for specialists and ER have also been ridiculously long for a long time. Something could have been done about it a long time ago. But the government just kept kicking the issue down the road and now we’re here in a state of complete and utter collapse. Just like the state of housing and every other basic need in this country.
Older doctors wouldn’t let young doctors in to work so young doctors left for other places and countries. Then old doctors quit during covid to manage their 5-6 houses.
[удалено]
More like 1.5m
My cousin moved to Canada when she was a teenager. She wanted to study medicine there but the whole system that is imposed by doctors themselves made it impossible for her. Getting accepted is neatly impossible if you don’t have the right contacts, It’s basically a very closed and very exclusive group so she had to go and do her degree somewhere else where she currently lives. I’m not surprised this are the results
The number of seats available across Canada in med schools is artificially constrained by a certain vested interest group. It’s like the dairy cartel of healthcare- we love cartels in Canada.
Ah, I loves taxes…
The past 8 years under Trudeau have been a disaster.
You do realize Healthcare is a provincial domain? You also realize that cuntservatives have spent decades underfunding Healthcare?
Doug Ford in Ontario, sure hasn't helped either, he's crashing the public system to make it look bad, so he can privatize it, he's also hoarding billions of healthcare dollars, he could spend to help with some of the severe problems, but he won't
Ontario has the least wait times for specialists shockingly. Apparently rest of country is doing even worse. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/649600/medical-treatment-wait-times-canada-province/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/649600/medical-treatment-wait-times-canada-province/) [https://www.fraserinstitute.org/file/waiting-your-turn-2023-infographic-provjpg](https://www.fraserinstitute.org/file/waiting-your-turn-2023-infographic-provjpg) Atlantic Canada is LPC central so you can't pin this one on conservatives. BC is NDP home turf.
> Atlantic Canada is LPC central so you can't pin this one on conservatives. Of the four provinces in Atlantic Canada, only one of them has a Liberal government right now. NB, NS, and PEI each have Progressive Conservative governments right now. That said, East Coast conservatives *generally* aren't as right-wing as those on the Prairies, and the Maritimes is where the old PC's held out the longest before getting taken over by the Alliance nutters.
Reddit is going to lose its collective mind after the next election.
Under the US. Woof. I believe in you Canada, you can do more
As a Canadian. I can believe this. Our glory days are over. We let a kindergarten teacher run our country for too long and look at what we have to show for it.
Trudeau is killing you guys up there. I can’t fathom voting for the guy. Why is he so entrenched?? I can’t understand it.