I won't even get into weather: the first few days of blue skies just started this week after a year of bleak gray-on-blue. Depressing is an understatement.
Unless you have terminal cancer or close to death, good luck getting any specialist’s attention. You’ll wait for a year on a waitlist for someone to care. Doesn’t matter if you have money either, no way around it.
Family doctor crisis is real, there are absurdly long wait times and people suffer as a result. But some things are also top notch. My wife just had our first son a few weeks ago and everything was really good - and parts of the process that were free would be very expensive in other places.
A few years ago, my family doctor noticed something concerning. I was seen by a specialist within a week, and was in the operating room a few days later. It was a potentially serious situation but not immediately life-threatening, yet I still received fast and efficient treatment.
There are longer wait times for high-demand procedures affecting 'quality of life', but that is the nature of triage.
The important part is that the whole episode cost me nothing more than a few sleepless nights, while a friend in the US who went through a similar process and spent a similar time waiting for surgery ended up with substantial medical debt.
But for those who needed it, it was fantastic. And the quality of care that I experienced there was on par or better with what I get in the US.
I don't think much has changed. I just went back, had a very minor medical issue, and within 2 hours after making my first call, I had see a primary care physician, who wasn't 100% sure, so she called in the specialist next door as well.
Canada has a family doctor crisis because they barely pay them, flat out. Often a pure family doctor doesn't even hit $200k, so any med student today is going to go some specialty route. It needs to equalize with walk-in clinic rates or it will continue to not have good supply.
Another special thing about the UK although is the amount of schooling needed to become one and consummate expense and risk seems significantly less. You can enter doctor school after high school and be in school for a significantly less amount of time. If you don't get in, you can move on with your life and go do something else with nothing really spent time wise or financially.
In the US/Canada, you need to get at least %75 of an undergrad, hope you get accepted into a graduate doctor school, which is extremely competitive, and then work you ass off in a very high workload situation, and then you need to do residency where your paid below minimum wage if you do an hours worked calculation, in a system designed by a doctor with a literal cocaine habit before cocaine was made illegal. Your in your 30s when you can start making proper money.
It's a combination of:
- A government that is outright hostile to health care workers, including fighting a battle against their unions during covid to reduce pay. The health minister famously went to a doctor's home and berated him from the driveway for tweeting something negative about him. Again, during the pandemic.
- Some specific changes to the pay schedule for doctors that makes it very difficult for them to spend more than 15 minutes with any given patient without losing out on income.
- The introduction a teledoctor system that pays better but most of the people on the other side of it don't live or work in the province.
And that's ignoring other kinds of medical workers, where they've done various things to force specialists to take on fewer patients, cut nursing headcounts to the bone, etc.
Every medical professional I've interacted with for the last few years (even before the pandemic) has seemed exhausted and on the verge of packing up and leaving.
Public Healthcare absorves the heaviest blows: expensive surgeries, cancer treatment etc are mostly or only done by the single payer public system, while private Healthcare enjoys mostly low severity cases.
If there was no private system, the public system would pay for all of that. What you’ve described actually seems like it goes easier on the public system by allowing it to specialize on certain kinds of issues
The basics are actually the thing it does best; covid vaccination for example went well once the political stuff was handled.
It seems like the ceiling here is the amount of investment it would put in to manage 100% of the health needs —- I don’t see how the parallel existence of a private system causes the public system to be larger than it would be if there were no private system