I had my appendix burst and waited for 18 hours in the ER. I nearly died, and owed thousands even though I have insurance. I live in the USA. Freedumb.
send them $10/month to keep it out of collections. hey making an effort. after 7 years they write it off.
I had a 14ga puncture wound last year in Canada, about 1" from my femoral artery. Rapidly flowing blood, tourniquet applied on-scene just below the groin.
Ambulance was on scene quickly, I was immediately put into the trauma center in the ER, stapled, full body CT with contrast, tetanus booster and some more stuff I don’t remember. Time in ER waiting room: zero. Time in hospital: ~1.5 hr total, mostly spent waiting for a follow up outside the ER.
I paid $250 for the ambulance and nothing else. Canada’s healthcare system is GREAT at keeping you alive (if you’re not indigenous, which is a true national shame).
Canada’s healthcare system is not amazing at keeping you healthy. Something minor and chronic? Get fucked, it’s a 2 year wait for a specialist referral. Minorly hurt but not at risk of death? Yeah enjoy the 4-10 hour wait in the ER room. When will you be seen? Idk when we can get to it. Want to see a doctor? Walkin will see you for free in about 45 minutes. Want to see your doctor? Yea they’re out this month working at the hospital, how’s 3 months from now?
All of this is vastly better than my time growing up in the US where the hospital missed diagnosing me with pneumonia and gave me permanent lung scarring. Or missed my fractured ankle on the xray and said I was fine. And then billed my parents 10’s of thousands of dollars.
Canada’s healthcare system is GREAT at keeping you alive
Canada’s healthcare system is not amazing at keeping you healthy
This is perhaps the most accurate explanation I’ve ever heard for our healthcare system here in Canada. I’m definitely going to use this in future.
I will say, in my city, our family doctor is in office at least 4 days a week.
If you dont have a scheduled slot, you can see another in the same clinic tho, but usually you wanna schedule if possible.
If you give them a few hours heads up before leaving, you can usually be in and out in lile an hour total which is fine imo for non-energency.
For emergencies you are not spending any time in the waiting room yeah, they are pretty good at fixing you up fast.
If you just go to a hospital 15 minutes out of town at a smaller city, non emergency wait times plummet tremendously.
We have like 3 hospital options where I live, to go to, that are an extra 15min drive but 1/10th the wait times for non-emergency.
Politicians love to pick the one hospital dead center of the city that is the busiest one and cherry pick its busiest time of year as average wait times.
In reality its the exception and most other hospitals are faster, and 1 city out from the major one and hospital wait times are negligible.
An ex had bad abdominal pain one night.
Trip to ER deemed emergency: free.
Night doctor determined likely gall stone, kept overnight in ER to be confirmed by morning ER doc: free. Morning doctor determined non-critical issue, added to wait list and scheduled checkin with specialist in 2 months. All free.Same pain next night. Same song and dance, ambulance, same ER night doctor, this time he stays overtime to ensure that it gets an ultrasound booked. Ultrasound later that morning determines it needs to come out. Admitted same day for surgery. Bumped two days because literal life and death surgeries(c-sections and a motorcycle v car accident victim) and some time to let the surgeon have some sleep. He shows up and gets it done first thing.
Two weeks later, end up getting minor surgery for drain removal because her parent’s cat purred on her nonstop and overhealed the drain scar.
All free.
Tldr: the Canadian system works on priority and is hobbled by conservatives.
Every conservative government cuts funding for every provincial healthcare system and then acts like the idea is flawed after they kneecapped it by limiting nursing hiring, freezing/reducing funding, and doing the 400th reorg to “find efficiencies”. They shuttered 3 ERs in my city against the pleas of the College of Physicians and our ER wait times went up a couple hours overnight.
Who could have guessed?
I will vote Liberal, I will vote NDP, I will vote Green, I will never vote conservative.
This is common and a literal conservative tactic called “starving the beast”. You strangle off funding to a thing you wanna cut, wait a couple months for the service to go to shit because they have to realign to compensate for having no money, and then go “wow look this sucks, better just kill it”.
Reagan did it in the 80s.
The “beast” in their narrative is “money going to poor people instead of me and my friends” lest you think any shred of what they do is defensible.
The UK? If so, Tories are assholes. If not, Tories are assholes.
6 month wait for a gall bladder removal in Ontario.
Tbh it would be nice to get those numbers down. Obviously not by privatising, but extending existing public capacity
That is the non critical wait time. If there is a risk at all of it bursting, that drops dramatically.
I had a rich guy leaving Canada claim that since he can get healthcare for $120 and see a doctor faster by flashing money in some 3rd world country, public healthcare is a scam. Like yea dude im sure if they privatized here the treatment would still be $120.
how do people not understand triage? The longer you wait, the less of an emergency it is.
If your experience with ER is waiting for longer than an hour, then you went to the Emergency Room without an Emergency.
Though I totally agree that triage is important, you can absolutely be left waiting for more than an hour with an emergency. It’s just not as pressing of an emergency as other people. There’s plenty that an urgent care can’t do for you that requires an ER but that is not life threatening within the next few hours.
Last time I went to the ER was because I slipped on the stairs, dropped a coffee mug, bashed my elbow into the shards of shattered mug (RIP beloved TARDIS mug) and needed to get the pieces removed, elbow stitched up, and an X-ray to make sure nothing was left inside.
Total time at the ER from parking in the parking lot to getting in the car to drive home was about 3 hours. I think the co-pay was $500.
That’s a suburban hospital on a relatively quiet evening. However, I’ve had other, similar experiences at that ER, and I don’t think I’ve ever had an unreasonable wait time there. They used to guarantee that you’d see a doctor in 30 minutes, but I think they abandoned that policy when they were absorbed into a larger health system.
If I was headed to a major, inner-city hospital, I would expect to be in the waiting area for a long time. I’ve definitely had ER visits that were 12 hours from start to finish at the downtown ER.
Fun trick if you don’t want to hang around in the waiting area:
Bring an obviously pregnant woman along. I’ve had the ER rush me along when my pregnant wife took me there. They are so conditioned to move pregnant women out of the ER that they’ll rush you through even if the pregnant woman is just your ride home (kidding kind of).
They are so conditioned to move pregnant women out of the ER that they’ll rush you through even if the pregnant woman is just your ride home (kidding kind of).
That’s probably for the best. Pregnant women (and their fetuses) are at much greater risk if they should catch a communicable disease and you never know what might be circulating in that waiting area.
Americans would KILL for a 12-hour wait.
Americans literally live their lives without hope of going to the doctor.
Not frustration at it taking so long.
Literal despair that they will never get to go to the doctor, paired with fear that if they do, they will have to pay literally tens of thousands.
It’s like if there’s a homeless person, and you tell them “I could bring you some food in 12 hours, or I could just never bring it to you. Which do you prefer?” And the Republicans will straight-up claim the homeless person would choose to never get the food because 12 hours is too long to wait.
I left the hospital with a drain in me.
Had to follow up to get it taken out - they only did drain removals one afternoon of the week. Something that took me thirty seconds to do when I got fed up and did it myself.
Me explaining to US friends that I’m upset that after leaving the hospital after surgery they had me buy my own antibiotics
yeah… we’re sorry. but you having a cancer is an “act of god”.
What would happen if everyone cancelled their health insurance and stopped paying outrageous surprise medical bills?
Because doing the “right” thing and hoping it will get better someday isn’t working very well.
Some people would die. In the end the survivors would be far better off. Question is mostly how long it would take. Could the medical/insurance industry make it without changing a thing for more than a month without health insurance? More than 6?
Some people would die.
That’s the hard part. But as a random pedantic internet asshole, I have to point out that the current system is also causing deaths.
$35,000 USD for surgery is on the low end. The US healthcare system is a complete shitshow.
I believe it means $35,000 AFTER insurance.
The post doesn’t mention surgery; it’s just the ER trip.
Accurate. I had an afib issue recently, went to the hospital at 9pm and sat there in the emergency room bed all night because they told me the cardiologist needed to see me before they could treat me. The cardiologist got in at 9am, and I continued to wait until 12:30pm without seeing them. It finally went back to normal rhythm at that point and I was discharged a few hours later. Luckily I have health insurance, so I didn’t have to pay much, but I don’t live in bumblefuck; I live in a pretty populated area of New York and was sitting there waiting for treatment for over 15 hours. It’s a dumb argument that we don’t have to wait for treatment as long as countries with socialized healthcare.
I have never waited for more than a couple hours in public (work-linked) health care or private (own insurance) hospitals in mexico
It’s a dumb argument that we don’t have to wait for treatment as long as countries with socialized healthcare.
Yeah it’s super disingenuous. They like to pretend like we don’t have wait times for specialists too. It’s ridiculous that people still try to use those arguments.
Oh that’s another thing; it’s two months to see a cardiologist by me… so they wanted me to follow up with a cardiologist after I got out of the emergency room and it’s a two month wait.
It’s weird, I had a-fib recently and the hospital didn’t let me see a cardiologist. I asked several times in the 3 days I was there, and the answer was always no. Until they discharged me, and then it was “you should see a cardiologist ASAP.”
That’s ridiculous. They didn’t shock you out of it? They’re not supposed to let it go more than 48 hours because your blood starts clotting in your heart around that time and can lead to a stroke. I guess they probably gave you blood thinners to prevent that though.
No shock, and they did give me a blood thinner after the first night. If I had known what I know now, I might have tried to advocate for myself more, but unfortunately that doesn’t always help.
I think the main risk with it is stroke from the clotting, so the blood thinners alleviate that risk. It’s odd that they didn’t try to shock you out of it tho, I’ve gone to the hospital about five times for it and converted back on my own, but twice they were going to shock me. Usually it’s that threat that scares me back to normal.
Yeah I don’t hear the long waiting lines argument anymore
