In Canada, The Healthcare System STINKS.

hat tip to Taxing Tennessee

...just like in UK, Cuba, probably Korea and Russia as well...

In Canada, if you need a CT scan, you go on a waiting list. If you needed it to detect something that was going to kill you in 5 months, you will be dead before your turn comes up. Literally.

In the USA, if you need a CT scan, you go from the doctor's office to the CT scan room. If it's not an emergent situation, you might have to come back tomorrow or next week.

What's the difference? In the USA, you or your private insurance company pay the CT people directly. In Canada, it's "free" and run (into the ground) by the government.

Here is the dirty little secret that Barack Healthcare for Everyone Obama and Hillary "you'll practice the medicine I say/you'll visit the OB/GYN I tell you to" Clinton don't want you to know, spoken by a Canadian that has no need to hide it:

"The contention that for-profit health care can exist along with a public system is not true," said Natalie Mehra, the report's author and director of the coalition. "It is a take-away from the public health-care system."

That's right kiddies. The free (sh*tty) healtcare for everyone crowd doesn't WANT you to be able to pay for your own health care. In Canada it's so bat that some people (willing to live and face consequences later) are paying thousand of dollars to be seen in a timely fashion and jumping ahead of the poor saps who are sucking on the government's teat for their imaging, surgical, and other services.

""For-profit clinics siphon out scarce specialists' time and (schedule) medically unnecessary procedures," Mehra said. . . . Queue-jumpers who can afford to pay at private clinics do so, and that means people in the public system wait longer, she added. In Ontario and Manitoba, Mehra said, they found local hospitals have reduced MRI hours because technologists have gone to for-profit clinics."

That is, since being a doctor here stinks and there are so few specialists, if you pay someone to do work instead of waiting for them to get a meager government check and they do work for you instead of someone who only gets them the government check, YOU are the bad guy. Note also that, in a Socialist system, the human spirit still thrives. Given the chance to make a profit for doing work, the worker tells the government-dependent to kick bricks. This is natural, and the reason that Capitalist societies thrive and Socialist/Communist societies either collapse into tyranny and suppress capitalism, or founder trying to do collectivism halfway.

In every country where the government has taken over health care, the quality of care (even life-threatening emergency care) has gone down drastically, while wait times are deadly -and outrageously- long. Oh, and if the government wants to improve service enough to drive out the private sector, they have to reach into the back pocket of the People to do so. How much of your money are you willing to pay every week for the assurance of decent health care?

In the USA, I pay something like 5% of my wages for a policy that will get me up to $2,000,000 worth of care, including everything I need and want to have done, and it will be done by-god-right-NOW, because it is all done

FOR

PROFIT.

To quote Austin Powers: "Hooray Capitalism!"