A former Cigna VP describes his 2007 PR campaign to lie to Americans about how bad the Canadian health-care system is: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2… Alas, it worked. I have family/friends in Canada, and wow, for all its warts, the system there works *so* much better than in the US

2:42 AM · Dec 26, 2020

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And honestly, there aren't even that many warts. A few years ago, my mother -- in her late 70s -- developed lung cancer. She'd smoked for decades. They gave her top-notch, speedy care, and a few years later she was cancer-free. Can you *imagine* how that would have gone down...
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... in the US? She was high-school-educated, living on a very modest pension from years in low-paid assistant jobs. She had not much savings, though she owned her condo. A US insurance company might have delayed, denied coverage. She could easily have been cleaned out
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And her story isn't remarkable or weird or unusual. It's fairly typical. The Canadian system isn't perfect; Canadians will give you an earful about it. But it isn't a horrorshow of Soviet waiting-lines and low-quality. It's mostly very, very good
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Replying to @pomeranian99
And I doubt all that many will give you an earful about it. Unless you’re sick or you work in it, Canadians just don’t have to think about healthcare and we’re very happy about that.
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Yeah, true enough. The earfuls I hear are mostly edge-cases and complaints about why good service isn't, like, *awesome* service. This is the sign of a healthy society! My wife and I remark on this a lot. Canadians have a sense of *good* entitlement about care
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Replying to @pomeranian99
I'm a Canadian expat living in the US by way of England and the US healthcare system is the stuff of nightmares. I fell off my bike and was knocked out. It cost me $2000 with good insurance! So I was hurt and then legally mugged.
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Egad, that experience is typical, yeah
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Replying to @pomeranian99
It has always been about protecting a “for profit” healthcare system.
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The only issue my Canadian family has ever had was my uncle getting a gray market knee replacement in Montreal. Not because the wait otherwise was too long, but because the hospital he’d have to go to had a high infection rate for the procedure. So he went to a plastic surgeon.
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Yep, that fits with the genre of complaints I hear from friends and family in Canada. Hip and knee replacements can be (no pun intended) a pain
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