Glad to hear!
Private system?
Yes, the reason we are sliding slowly into the American mercenary system. It robs talent and denies equal access to non-rich. It should be criminal.
It’s a blight but with a huge fan club.
Why does it have a huge fan club? What’s wrong with the public system?
Lots. Wait times are high, getting a family doctor is a Herculean task, getting refered to a specialist is a gauntlet of tasks with months/years wait.
Don’t get me wrong, if you have an emergency, you’ll be seen quickly and cared for by professionals. Cancer treatments, life threatening stuff, amazing care.
But trying to be proactive or deal with long standing but “minor” issues is… Well, very very difficult. And it’s costly, because every appointment is a missed day/half day of work and gas/travel to said specialists, and you rarely get to choose when they happen.
So people who can afford it obviously want to skip the line. So politicians make excuses for why a private system actually helps the public one. You know, by stealing the talent away from the public system, reducing volume and therefore advocacy for the public system and many other problems.
That and US Pharma/private healthcare corporations would LOVE to be able to set up shop up here and suck us dry like they do their own.
I’ve been tempted on occasion to try and seek paid care for chronic quality of life issues that my doctor just doesn’t have the time for. It took 6 years and 8 visits with 3-4 months between to try some over the counter crap the I had tried on my own but didn’t work, but she wouldn’t send the reference because "the specialist will just make you do this first, so at the very least when you get to them you can “skip” this… Except I had to do it and wait without seeing someone who knew anything…
It’s stuff I can live with, and with the work I do, getting a random day off isn’t easy, so I go through “well it’s fine” phases and then “no really I want this fixed”. Phases. I have a friend who just went to the states (2 years ago) and had 6 appointments in a week and had all her concerns addressed, with followup phonecalls and another visit for one issue…
Why our system doesn’t work better is because there is more money to be made (on a corporate ledger, not a “society actually saves money with healthy happy people” way) if it slowly fails and privatizes.
I can’t speak for all provinces but the three I’ve lived in all had smaller private clinics for specialists, imaging, specific fields of medicine and so on that are established parts of the public healthcare system. In these cases, the government effectively works as the insurer on behalf of patients, but many of these clinics also offer services which are not covered. The Canadian Medical Association provides a more thorough explanation of this here.
Quebec has a two tier healthcare system and “private system” doctors are not covered by the provincial healthcare scheme because they charge much higher rates than permitted. Because of this, they bill directly to rich clients, clients with good health insurance, or desperate clients who can’t wait for the broken public system.
The solution is to pay doctors. Doctors in Quebec are paid much less than doctors in Ontario. This is despite the fact that healthcare costs in Quebec are higher than Ontario mostly due to a bloated bureaucracy that manages in.
This law is the equivalent of passing a law that “life must be good in Quebec”. Instead of fixing the real problem, they try to force doctors to work for lower wages than their peers. The consequences will be that prospective doctors will simply pay slightly more for a medical degree in another province and quickly recoup the costs by working in another province, or working in the corrupt private system in Quebec.
Typical assenine Quebec government solution, all bluster.
Interesting. I’m in Ontario and I’m under impression that all facilities are private in this regards, including the hospitals. I think most are non-profit though.
There’s some level of privatized healthcare in all provinces, even if it’s just for esthetic stuff… But in Quebec the private system is pretty well implemented and the government is (surprisingly for that party) trying to reverse the movement. In a year we have more doctors leaving the public sector than the total number of private doctors in Ontario…
There is one or two Private Clinics in Saskatchewan; you pay $100 or something like that for a script refill then something like that for a doctors note as well. Then there is some expensive bill you pay to see a NP, or some other naturopathic professional. Not nocking NP’s they are as capable as other professionals in the field. I am not going to knock the naturopathic professionals for the field they are in either but it those clinics are a scam.
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