Last updated on 2017-06-30
Happy Canada Day! 150 years of Confederation!
Universal health care, and Canadians still get to eat poutine—just another reason Canada is ahead by a century and a half…
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Notes from a South Dakota Ex-Pat
Last updated on 2017-06-30
Happy Canada Day! 150 years of Confederation!
Universal health care, and Canadians still get to eat poutine—just another reason Canada is ahead by a century and a half…
Comments are closed.
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/citizenship/become.asp
Want to know what Canada’s all about, hoser? It’s all about Bubbles and his kitties … and hockey.
“TRAILER PARK BOYS” full movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sX6HMM8A_c
CANADA HEALTH CARE: “My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.”~ https://www.city-journal.org/html/ugly-truth-about-canadian-health-care-13032.html
FAKE NEWS ALERT … Ol’Sargie … someone needs to put a shock collar on you. If you believe the stuff you read from non-accredited, extreme conservative sources you’ll die a sad man. The above comes from City Journal, a magazine from the Manhattan Institute. Here’s a bit about ’em and GOOGLE can tell you much more about how fake what they say is. Happy Canada Day, Sarge. Hope you don’t need an ER.
~Manhattan Institute Has Received Funding From The Koch Family Foundations. The Manhattan Institute has received over $1.3 million total from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation and the David H. Koch Foundation over the years, both of which are associated with Koch Industries, an oil, gas and chemical corporation. From 2001 to 2009 (the most recent year for which data is available), the Lambe Foundation gave The Manhattan Institute $200,000 annually. The Lambe Foundation’s board of directors is “comprised entirely of Koch family members, senior Koch executives, and staff who serve Koch foundations,” including the CEO of Koch Industries Charles G. Koch, according to Greenpeace.
Interesting, Joe: for citizenship, Canada requires that an applicant have lived in country and paid income tax for at least four years, demonstrate basic skill in English or French, and pass their Canadian knowledge test. The study guide does not mention The Tragically Hip, but it does mention hockey, Canadian football, curling, and lacrosse.
Nice anecdote, OldSarg. My wife can neutralize that anecdote with her own, about a friend on a trip in Canada, also in the 1990s, who was injured, went to the ER, was treated immediately and effectively, and received no bill. We can also speak to our experience of paying premiums via taxes in Vancouver that were cheaper than any private insurance premiums we’d had in America and bought more comprehensive coverage.
And poutine.
Cory,
I reckon 4 years as a Permanent Resident will give someone a good enough taste of authentic Canadian living to then decide if citizenship is right for them.
I will be sticking with my US citizenship…for now :)
Me too—I won’t move, but I sure like to visit!
Thankfully this Canadian is still writing protest songs and singing them. “Ohio” was so spot on to describe a government that lost its way, and now this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RKBUG9VLFU
In 2007, my wife and I went to Colorado to visit an old friend who was trying to be treated for prostate cancer. At that time, he was the owner of a good sized company that had great health insurance. It did not matter because to coordinate the facility with the oncologist was a nightmare. He went steadily downhill for months languishing while waiting for those two things to come together. Finally, after almost 4 months, he was able to get his treatments started. This was in Colorado Springs, so it was not some far flung rural area in that great state, it was in a major city there.
We are going to be seeing much more of this kind of treatment scheduling as we populate, get older and sicker. Doctors are now killing one another in shoot outs, so we will not only loose them by attrition, we may start loosing them in gunfights among themselves. In short, it soon will not matter what kind of insurance you may have, it will depend on the luck of the draw so to speak, on the slot you can get for your specialized treatments.
Thune/Rounds/NOem/Daugaard and Krebs, the 4 horsemen plus a catch colt, in whatever order you see, have promised they will make this worse with their ill guided destruction of our healthcare in general.
We already take medical tourism as a good way to seek our needed affordable treatments abroad, that may include Canada if we keep destroying ourselves. India for heart procedures/surgery, Mexico for medical and especially dental needs, Thailand for orthopedic procedures, the list goes on.
@Jerry … The majority of us in CO disown Colorado Springs. Known as the Evangelical Vatican and rated the 4th most conservative city in USA discounts most of what happens there. My late wife got treatment for her breast cancer quickly and properly which added at least ten years to her life. But, not in Colorado Springs.
PS … To all tourists. Avoid The Springs. Republicans have cut taxes so much that the park’s grass has died, trash lines the streets, copper thieves ravage turned off streetlights at night and every good RedLover gets an extra hundred bucks a year in tax savings. “What a dump.” – Bette Davis
All of my family members are Canadians. My Sister whom at that time lived in St. Katherine’s, Ontario went for a routine check up only to find that she had a tumor. The surgery was ordered right away, not in weeks , months or years. My Sister was operated on two days later and and stayed in the hospital for a few days for observation. Please let us not spread fear about Canadian Health Care System.
HAPPY CANADA DAY!
Thanks, Clara
Spreading fear of the different has been successful among the timid forever.
Buying as a group saves money.
Don’t know about Canada but my cousins husband in New Zealand works for their national healthcare system. He visits kidney dialysis patients to see how they AND their dialysis machines are doing. While we were there we visited one of his patients who does his own dialysis at night while he sleeps! He’s still a productive member of society. In this country you can give up a productive life if you have to go on dialysis while in NZ they consider it much better for the patient to do the procedure at home. Similarly, another cousin wanted a hernia surgery and would have gone on a waiting list. He was going to do some traveling so paid extra to have it done right away. His cost was $1200.
Somehow I don’t think universal health care would be so bad.
Thank you for sharing Tragically Hip and Gord Downie’s curtain call tour. What an outstanding, yet tragic story. Perhaps I would have heard more of the Hip without the US corporate choke hold on rock play lists cluttering the airwaves repeating the same old same old where less than 7% of the songs receive over 87% of the air time.
“Ahead by a Century” could become the new anthem for Canada, or any one of several first world nations while the US follows the United Kingdom turning inward, fearful, looking to the past for failed solutions, and otherwise swirling the drain.
Socialist bossturds, but with bacon and beer. They should oust that French speaking state into its own little country, too, and speak the King’s English.
I apologize if my comment offends some Canucks out there. The words “Gord Downie” to a dyslexic old fellow like me read “Gordon Howie” and that tax cheating, overgodding bossturd owes me money. “Gord Downie” is like a stick poked into my craw, it is.
Clyde, the last thing the corporate bosses want us to know is how easy it is to find your way around the universal healthcare. I do not know about New Zealand, but in Europe, you can both public healthcare and private healthcare as well. Private healthcare is sometimes a part of an employer offer to their employees. The main reason for that is for wellness exams and those types of coverage that the employee does not have to wait for, kind of like Urgent Care here in the states. If you have a major thing going like cancer, you go public all the way. They treat you quickly so you have as good if not better outcome than you do here in the states.
BTW, public healthcare in Europe also contains unemployment benefits, workmen’s compensation, family leave, disability and survivor benefits. How in the world did we get ourselves so backward in such an upward world?
grudznick: Gord Downie, Gordon Howie, Gordie Howe? The first & third are outstanding; the middle, not-so. Consider practicing that English language you venerate. In the meantime, consider wheeling yourself into the local memory care unit. Our world needs fewer grumpy old men with their fingers on the intertubes.
I spent a career in the US’s largest socialist organization and now receive its socialist health care – the US military. I’d take a day in socialism over a lifetime in the vacillating cruelty, retribution filled ‘free market’. My Nordic stay-behind relatives showed the way.
https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/how-swedes-and-norwegians-broke-the-power-of-the-1-percent/
It (governance, life) is about “us”; not “me”. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-nordic-countries/473385/
Great article, John. If we call socialism by the name selfish-ism it would still be the same. Buying as a group means more for me. More spending money at the end of the month for ME. More time with MY family. More vacation for ME. More doctor care for ME. The only thing less is how much it costs Me I join a group to help MYSELF not the group!!
Mr. John, you are probably righter than right. If it is my disability you mock, then I understand and forgive you. If it is my age and decrepitness you despise, then that is understandable. If it is my kindness and expression of my thoughts you despise, then shame on you for you are downright un-American and un-South Dakotan. grudznick is all about love and forgiveness, and the American Way. May you have a happy 4th of July, sir.
But let us not also forget that we stand tall with our “Freedom Fries” in hand, while I have heard that some up north, especially in Quebec, still call them “French Fries”…… Or is that “Frites Francais?” ;-)
Happy July 4th Everyone!!!…… And in reality thank God for the French, because without them we would have never won the Revolutionary War…..
Combine Clyde’s openness to reform with John’s note about where we already rely on socialism instead of the free market, in treating our soldiers and veterans, not to mention our elders on Medicare.
We’ll still have problems under a single-payer plan. We’ll still complain about waiting and rationing, which both happen now under private insurers. But single-payer would give us a simpler and cheaper system. Good call, Canada!