Do you have good Health care in Canada?

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â™¥Lilyâ™¥

Every province is different. I live in Ontario. Yes it is good, but there are cons to everything.

Angela O brings up a good question, does Canada have good health care compared to what? Well, to answer that Canada has good healthcare compared to the U.S but it cannot even compare to England's health care system. Watch the move "Sicko". It talks about U.S. health care and compares it to Canada and England. Definitly an interesting movie.

Moving on I will inform you of the cons I notice. I have a friend that now lives in Ohio, she lived her in Ontario up until she was 18. She ahs pointed out to me that Canadian doctors (family doctors more specifically) tend to care less. This is because Americans pay everytime they visit the doctor so its seen as a business and has a little competiton. If you find a problem with the doctor you'll probably not go back to him/her. In Canada as it is the government that pays them they don't really have the same views.

I noticed one answer talked about walk-in clinics and how there can be a 3-4 hour wait. This is not a problem in our town. I've been to a walk in clinic 3 times and each time I was in the doctors office within minutes. Yes, there is a major shortage of doctors here. Which is really bad, sometimes it can take a month to make an appointment with a doctor. Actually, the hospital here has talked about shutting down the emergency room for certain times during the day. Which is ridiculus because what if you came in with a serious injury or in labour!

Which brings up another point... emergency wait times. I live in a small city and I went to emerg for a 2nd degree burn and waited 4 hours. Whats even worse there were 2 other young kids waiting also, one with a broken arm, one with a broken leg. When I got there I overheard one the mothers say they had been waiting 4 hours so far. And it was really hard to see because the poor kids were in tears because of the pain. This is not nearly as bad as the Capital of Canada... Ottawa. Their wait times for the ER can be 8-10 hours with a broken bone. Yikes!

Speciailists are even worse. I made an appointment with a specialist recently and its going to be 2 months before I get in to see him just for a consultation. Other specialists can be even 4-5 months. I'd hate to see the wait list for surguries.

One more thing, we may be able to go to the ER for free, see a doctor for free and even have surgury for free but our eye care, dental care and perscriptions cost money. Which all depends on where you are employed. Some people have really good health plans where they work. My father for example has 100% perscription coverage. So anything perscribed he pays nothing for. Government employees have 80% coverage. So if you need some pills filled that cost $100 you'd only be paying $20 because of the 80% coverage. Government also has 80% dental with the exception of braces and cosmectic proceedurs such as teeth whitening. Myself, I have no employee coverage. So, I pay straight out for all my pills. If I wanted to go have a cavity filled, it'd probably be a couple hundred dollars out of my pocket.

So, there are definite advantages but there are definite downsides to it also.

Hope this helped!

EnglishDenis

Yes, I am 64 and have no complaints

I think we have great healthcare in Canada! There are things we can improve, of course, but overall I'm incredibly happy with it.

pinkpiglet126

I think some of it depends on where you live. In Calgary we have good health care. Could it be better, yes. Could it be worse - heavens yes.

I'm pretty satisfied however.

Explorer

We have excellent health care

HAPA CHIC

live in Ontario all my life and I would say YES

I hear so many wrong things about it .I have never had to wait for surger and I had two in the last year .Sometimes a person that is worse than you is just scheduled before you .I never had to wait too long to see a doctor either like I hear some americans claim canadians do

SteveN

Canada has a decent health care system. It could be a helluva lot better, but not bad compared to other countries, in my opinion.

PROS:
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You can walk into any hospital or clinic and arrange to see a physician regarding the problems you may be having. All you need is your Medicare card (like a public health insurance card). You will not be turned away because you don't have enough money or don't have insurance.

The doctors that we have in most of the major hospitals are quite good at what they do. I have an aunt whose life was saved after suffering from an aneurysm in her 30s, and my Dad survived a heart attack in his 50s by the team at Sacre-Coeur Hospital in Montreal.

Medication is expensive here, but Medicare helps pay part of that and the price is not as high as in other countries (USA for example) because the drug prices are either controlled or they offer generic alternative so you can pay for the medicine and not the brand name.

CONS:
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There is definitely a shortage of family doctors, more noticeable in some provinces than others. It has been said that one in four Canadians do not have a family doctor, and this is true of me and my family. In Montreal, it is very difficult to find any practitioners who are willing to take on new patients...they simply do not have the hours to address the ones they already have. In Calgary, the problem is less noticeable, as many doctors are moving there to start practices just as all the people who were moving there for the job opportunities.

Wait times at walk-in clinics and hospital emergency wards can be quite long.

At clinics, doctors are allotting 8-10 minutes to spend with each patient, rarely enough time to diagnose and treat their problems. Patients arrive before the clinics open, wait 3-4 hours for a 10 minute consultation. Some clinics are taking down names and only the first forty people on the list will see the doctor...the others are told to come back the next day and try again.

At hospitals, you will be triaged within the first 30 minutes of getting there. If your problem is not life-threatening, you may wait hours to see one of the doctors on call. My father went in complaining of chest pains and a history of heart problems, they took him in and within five minutes, he was in a bed hooked up to an ECG. However, a friend of the family fell down her stairs and thought she fractured her leg, and she waited 13 hours in the emergency ward waiting room!

So you see, it can go either way. Some people (myself included) would like to see some sort of system go in that would reduce the number of people that are using the system for non-essential services. But with the public worried about the quality of a two-tiered system, and people not willing to accept user fees because they are worried people with actual chronic problems would be penalized, that makes introducing some new health system structure a very tough sell and a political hot potato.

Dave M

Excelllant question! I'll be watching with you to see the answers, as I live in the USA and pay 366 dollars a month on private health insurance per month, and struggle with my views going back and forth on the idea of universal health insurance for the USA. Right now, I'm for it, because I pay so much. But what works in Canada might not work as well in the U.S. Thanks for asking the question!

isotope2007

No we dont, its sub standard to every country in the civilized world, even China has better Health Care then Canada does. google "problems with Canadian Health Care "

Angela O

Do we (Canadians) have good health care compared to whom? And in regards to what?

If you ask specific questions I will be more than happy to answer, I just don't know what exactly you are looking for.

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