Your experience with universal health care.

[Elion]

This thread is for the discussion of people who live in a country that has universal health care and can speak first-hand on their experiences.

I live in America and currently do not have health insurance. Day to day, I hear discussion on universal health care which in America, I have a lot of trouble believing anything I hear about it.

I feel like the best way to get REAL opinions from real people is to ask them myself.

so onRPG, do any of you members in countries with universal health care have any stories to tell? Any comments to say on how well you think the system works? Anything you don't like about it?

[Deimos]

i busted my head open as a child and apart from the mega-trauma which i think is still with me to this day it didnt cost a thing to get me fixed up. which i am grateful for. thats about my only experience with the british national health service. the food is bad, the hospitals are not as clean as youd like and half the nurses dont speak english.

as for the nhs itself its going down the sh*tter. which is a shame because its a brilliant idea and a poll in the Times newspaper had the nhs rated as one of the top ten most important achievments of the 20th century, it was right up there with beating hitler. it sickens me to think its being left to collapse like a rotten husk.

yah i know lets spend £4 million on a single tank and $80.000 a pop on javelin missiles but **** the nhs, that can go hang. lets just give all the directors and ceo's great big fat pensions for doing sod all and then promote them to senior-arch-vice-chancellor-emperor-high wizard once theyve reached a certain weight and then give them a big house somewhere.

god damn morons, the nhs needs more leadership on the ground, not re-shuffling of management on top. stupid ivory tower assholes.

[NecromancerJali]

Well, I live in Canada, and my dad has a brain tumor. The only thing keeping him alive is this drug called Temodal. BUT.. You see, none of this is covered, dropping a $4,000 bill on our hands every month to pay for them. Canada's health care sucks.

[Ponder]

Well, I live in Canada, and my dad has a brain tumor. The only thing keeping him alive is this drug called Temodal. BUT.. You see, none of this is covered, dropping a $4,000 bill on our hands every month to pay for them. Canada's health care sucks.

Thank Harper for that dumb *** mistake.

[NecromancerJali]

Thank Harper for that dumb *** mistake.

Yeah.. My dad was on the news all over Canada though and people are doing stuff to try and get his Themodal covered, so I guess it's all good.

But I guess I should take into consideration all of the times I needed stitches and broke bones before I say that Canada's health care sucks.

[ddm151bobby]

I am a Canadian myself. I do know that we have to pay for our medication out of our own pockets, but some jobs offer a health plan that pays for a portion or all of the medication costs.

My father's plan pays for all but $1.00 of each medication we need. Without it, we would be paying over $2000 a month for my mother's meds alone.

[Richard0]

It already sounds better than America, where if anything happens to me right now I will be screwed with payments for life and no one will ever care since I'm not covered. :l

One of the biggest things I hear about universal health care is along the lines of 'You generally have to wait MONTHS to actually see the doctor, and people die before they even have a chance to!'. Is there any truth to that?

Months?! Definitely not in Canada! I used to live in the States; some hospitals there have longer waiting times than here, so I've heard from my relatives. Speaking for Canada, that is completely false; I don't think I have ever heard of a patient dying because he/she could not see the doctor in time. That is just to scare you and make you believe paying is the best way. I've broken my arm and one hospital had a long waiting time so we took 10 minutes to go to another one and I was seen right away (My friend drove me, not an ambulance).

My cousin lives in the Big Apple and suffered a deep wound in the arm;7 hours and around $1,200 is what cost him to get it healed. I'm pretty sure he wasn't kidding; his parents told me he started getting dizzy. I don't know if in the States you are allowed to see different hospitals (I lived in USA when I was pretty small) because of the whole insurance thing.

[Str1der]

You're fooling yourself if you believe any other place has the same type of quality, medical wise, as the US. Higher educated doctors work here, and yes, a big incentive is the pay that they recieve. It's why they work so hard, go through so much schooling, and do the jobs they do. I'm not stating I love America's health care system, but I'm opposed to a universal one.

A family friend of ours, who lives in Canada, had an extremely bad earache a few years back. He tried to go to the hospital to recieve medication for it early on as to not let it get any worst and ended up having to wait 6 months just to recieve any type of workable medicine. In that time his ear-ache became so bad he was forced to have surgery on his ear. Sorry, that just doesn't seem worth it to me.

I do wish America would do something different with our current health care system though. Medicare and everything along those lines are currently a joke.

[Str1der]

Perfer? Is that maybe...because you live in that states? Maybe it is. *gasp*

Ooh, ho ho ho, lookie here! We've got a joker!

I've experienced both systems. I think I'm allowed to make a call in which I prefer, wouldn't you agree?

[Slade]

You're fooling yourself if you believe any other place has the same type of quality, medical wise, as the US. Higher educated doctors work here, and yes, a big incentive is the pay that they recieve. It's why they work so hard, go through so much schooling, and do the jobs they do. I'm not stating I love America's health care system, but I'm opposed to a universal one.

A family friend of ours, who lives in Canada, had an extremely bad earache a few years back. He tried to go to the hospital to recieve medication for it early on as to not let it get any worst and ended up having to wait 6 months just to recieve any type of workable medicine. In that time his ear-ache became so bad he was forced to have surgery on his ear. Sorry, that just doesn't seem worth it to me.

I do wish America would do something different with our current health care system though. Medicare and everything along those lines are currently a joke.

I think you should look at more healthcare systems before dismissing a universal healthcare system, after all, all you did was take an example from your experiences in America's Hat.