By the time it was made official, all the Provinces had either gotten together to pool their services, or implemented similar enough programs that the Canadian government could work out a way to standardize and oversee their Medicare program and save even more money for the average Canadian.
You can still purchase supplemental Health care if you want special treatment that isn't covered, but every health care (critical and maintenance) and wellness service has been negotiated with ***private and public health entities***, and is covered by the Canadian system. The main problem with Canadian health care that I've noticed is that rural areas (of which there are a lot of rural communities) do not always have enough health care equipment and support available for people with disabilities or in cases where there is a significant rise in people requiring specialized services (like disease or injury even clusters). (On edit) - This is also a problem in U.S. rural areas, where people also have to travel long distances or wait significant amounts of time to get the services they need now. The primary difference is that in rural Canada, they at least have emergency services fairly close, and they won't get turned away or told "you/your wife can't have that emergency procedure" because the only emergency facility within 200 sq. miles is a religious clinic and doesn't do that particular procedure.
It also doesn't cost an arm and a leg to get into the Medical field in Canada. So a Doctor (or Nurse) doesn't have to have the stress of paying off hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years in student loans, like they do down here.
Y'know, if Blue Cross/Blue Shield hadn't become such a cynical everything for-profit entity - if it had remained a "non-profit" organization instead of abandoning their core focus for higher profit margins in the 1980's, that company could have been in on the ground floor. (They were stripped of their "not for profit" status in California in 2014 after decades of middleman skimming services from the "cheap" employer plans and individual patient plans they provided).
Haele
= new reply since forum marked as read
