On 4/11/2016 9:39 AM, Dave Smith wrote:
> On 2016-04-11 10:08 AM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
>
>> You said you now have to pay a small premium for coverage. That is just
>> the first step to a larger premium How USA of them to start you on the
>> path.
>>
>> Sounds to me that both systems need some work. At least I know what my
>> payments are, you guys have it buried in taxes and no one seems to
>> really know what it is costing you.
>>
>
> The annual premium is less than a lot of Americans are paying monthly,
> and our overall taxes are not higher than yours.

BULLSHIT PREVARICATION!


http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/nadeem-...b_3733080.html

But the reality is that the Canadian health care system is not free --
in fact, Canadian families pay heavily for healthcare through the tax
system. That high price paints the long wait times and lack of medical
technologies in Canada in a very different light.

In 2013, a typical Canadian family of four can expect to pay $11,320 for
public health care insurance. For the average family of two parents with
one child that bill will be $10,989, and for the average family of two
adults (without children) the bill comes to $11,381. As a result of
lower average incomes and differences in taxation, the bills are smaller
for the average unattached individual ($3,780), for the average
one-parent-one-child family ($3,905), and the average one-parent
two-child family ($3,387). But no matter the family type, the bill is
not small, much less free.

And the bill is getting bigger over time. Before inflation, the cost of
public health care insurance went up by 53.3 per cent over the last
decade. That's more than 1.5 times faster than the cost of shelter (34.2
per cent) and clothing (32.4 per cent), and more than twice as fast as
the cost of food (23.4 per cent). It's also nearly 1.5 times faster than
the growth in average income over the decade (36.3 per cent).

And what did these substantial funds buy?

Despite talk of wait times reduction initiatives (backed with
substantial funding), Canadians face longer wait times than their
counterparts in other developed nations for emergency care, primary
care, specialist consultations, and elective surgery. Access to
physicians and medical technologies in Canada lags behind many other
developed nations. And things have improved little since 2003. For
example, the total wait time in 2012 (17.7 weeks from GP to treatment)
is every bit as long it was back then.

Don't be fooled by claims that health spending isn't high enough or that
transfers for health care to the provinces have been insufficient.
Canada's health care system is the developed world's most expensive
universal-access health care program after adjusting for the age of the
population (older people require more care).

Canadians aren't suffering from health care underfunding; they're
suffering from health care underperformance.

And it gets worse. Changing demographics mean Canada's health care
system has a funding gap of $537 billion. While health care is costly
and underperforming today, in the absence of reform the future will
either hold large increases in taxes, further reductions in the
availability of medical services, further erosion of non-health care
government services, or all of the above.