healthcare in Canada vs US

The waits for such routine things are nothing like that in my experience. However, long waits do occur and there is work being done to help reduce that.Some specialties are in short supply and the waits can be long for none urgent cases.One big difference between here and there is that here everyone has access to reasonable (even dammed good) healthcare. Everyone!

There are occasions when a particular operation has long waiting lists (knee or hip e.g.) and some patients are sent to the US for those. I don't have statistics on how many. This is paid by the healthcare system.There are also individuals who are better off who pay for some procedures themselves and to to the US to get it done quicker than it might be available here.They system is stretched very tight. I don't think anyone will disagree with that. Personally I believe that we can not supply all services to all individuals and hae to make some decisions on which will be covered and which not. I am close to a number of people who work in the medical area and know that it does need both more resources and some revamping. We are still IIRC, a couple or more % of GDP less costly than the only partially working US system. A bump in resources of that magnitude would make a big difference to how well the system works here.Meanwhile, the system works reasonably well, in my own experience and with others in my family and circle of friends who have neeeded care.If our system left out the percentage of the population that is left out in the US we would consider it utterly broken and more like a thrid world nation than anything else. The rich get care and the poor don't.

What you may be forgetting is the real, underlying reason that our society feels that healthcare is a responsibility of all of us.We believe that no one should die of being poor.Nor should they be incapacitated, unable to work or put through unnecessary suffering because of lack of money.There are differences between our society and the one to our south. This is one of them.We do not do the best job of managing the implementation of the basic principles but that is definitely where we start. This comes from the top down and the bottom up.Where we might be going wrong is to allow this to become an idealogical purity issue. The tendancy is to think that everyone should have everything paid for by all of us. This is already not done or attempted but we forget that maybe we should think through what and who should be covered in what way.Over and over you hear the politicians saying "No two tier system!" When we already have more than two tiers. Instead they need to work through what we really want to protect people from.