If you have an urgent care situation in Canada, you can walk into an emergency room or clinic and yes, your care will be triaged, but within a reasonable period (a few hours at most for most issues, e.g. a new persistent pain in your arm) but more typically within about an hour or less for most issues, (like a broken limb would be near immediate) you will be able to see a doctor and recieve first line assessment and treatment.
If you need additional imagery or specialist study, you then do have to schedule these things. I've gone through this process in the last year and had multiple kinds of medical imagery done, as well as a procedure by a specialist in response to a doctor's initial findings. The appointments for imagery and specialist work were completed within the week following my initial appointment. In the past for far less urgent issues, I've had to wait up to a month.
All of this was comfortable, timely, and safe, and I did not ever have to wonder what expenses might arise. In the United States, this would have certainly destroyed all of my savings.
I'm glad your mother received the care she needed and is well, and I don't have personal experience dealing with cancer diagnosis and treatment here, so it may of course be different! But my own small issues could have destroyed me financially in America, or I would have more likely just never had them dealt with, and I am ostensibly in the relative financial elite as a decently paid tech worker with some actual savings.
Please, don't snidely smear this system, in a post about airplanes for god's sake! And certainly not on the basis of "death lists", and certainly not in comparison to America, because the United States has plain old deaths at home to far outweigh them, where no one was even waiting for anything.
The health care system here has issues, sure. Big issues! But in comparison to the American system it is an unmitigated good, at the absolute least for everyone with less than say, a million dollars in liquid savings.
If you need additional imagery or specialist study, you then do have to schedule these things. I've gone through this process in the last year and had multiple kinds of medical imagery done, as well as a procedure by a specialist in response to a doctor's initial findings. The appointments for imagery and specialist work were completed within the week following my initial appointment. In the past for far less urgent issues, I've had to wait up to a month.
All of this was comfortable, timely, and safe, and I did not ever have to wonder what expenses might arise. In the United States, this would have certainly destroyed all of my savings.
I'm glad your mother received the care she needed and is well, and I don't have personal experience dealing with cancer diagnosis and treatment here, so it may of course be different! But my own small issues could have destroyed me financially in America, or I would have more likely just never had them dealt with, and I am ostensibly in the relative financial elite as a decently paid tech worker with some actual savings.
Please, don't snidely smear this system, in a post about airplanes for god's sake! And certainly not on the basis of "death lists", and certainly not in comparison to America, because the United States has plain old deaths at home to far outweigh them, where no one was even waiting for anything.
The health care system here has issues, sure. Big issues! But in comparison to the American system it is an unmitigated good, at the absolute least for everyone with less than say, a million dollars in liquid savings.