11 hours wait to see a doctor for son’s broken foot in Canadian capital | Hacker News Reader

11 hours wait to see a doctor for son’s broken foot in Canadian capital

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14 pointsilrwbwrkhv10 comments

My experience is that you get seen quickly at the E-Room in the US in a rural area or a small town but the waits can get extreme even in a small city.

I saw somebody wait 10 hours to get admitted to the hospital with (very) terminal cancer, for instance.

Broken bones are a bad case for going to the E-room because the facilities of the hospital are overkill.

I don’t mean to be insensitive, but why would you compare emergency room visits with admission times for terminal cancer? They are, quite literally, the complete opposite ends of the spectrum.

In the US, public healthcare is delivered via emergency room. My friend's healthcare plan is to go to the ER and give them a fake name, which he developed after a fight that resulted in a head injury wherein he was unable to remember any details of his trip to the emergency room. He never got a bill, couldn't remember any details and wasn't sure what name he gave them, and it worked well enough that that's just what he does now. Quite a system the US has developed.

Oh good lord, no it is not. Yes, that is one option, and something frequently used by the homeless and some of the under-served groups in the US, but it is not even remotely the standard or how “healthcare is delivered”.

This is the same argument a lot of people in Europe use when talking about how great their healthcare system is. I still don’t understand why 99% of them start with “I got in a fight”…

It is literally my friend's only source of healthcare. Reading back, I should probably have said universal rather than public. It's the only thing like a universal system that we have.

My father-in-law had seen an oncologist through the course of his disease and when he was within a few days of death (e.g. very terminal) he was instructed to go the e-Room where he spent a long time in line before going to triage and then being admitted to hospice.

So this is not the way lumpenproletariat die, this is what happens if you have good insurance and got standard care.

The CBC announced there would be reductions at 14 Ontario hospitals due to staffing shortages over the long weekend: https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/staff-shortages-force-14...

It's bad. The root cause is that Canadian provinces all decided to short-sheet each other by not paying to educate and train sufficient doctors, for many decades. Socialism run by governments that despise socialism quickly rots. If even a few (conservative-run) provinces decide to short-sheet, the rest tend to feel obliged to follow. Granted, democracies tend to be short-sighted; the furthest horizon is hardly more than one election away.

I distinctly recall that claims that this happens we're "debunked" as "fake news" back when it was a more salient topic.

I don't think anyone denied that it ever happened, I think they denied it was typical. And it isn't typical: the average emergency room wait in Ontario is around 2 hours (https://www.hqontario.ca/system-performance/time-spent-in-em...).

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