As a Canadian living in the USA… the efficiency of the US healthcare system in comparison to Canada’s is INCREDIBLY overstated. From my experience it has been no more efficient, but a HELL of a lot more expensive and insanely depressing.
What if they use the wrong billing code? What if part of their automation to increase efficiency means being charged for work that was never done? What if they send testing out to a place that is our is network? What is the hospital is in network but the fucking emergency room is not?
Before the ACA you could add: what if I hit my lifetime maximum coverage and what if they consider my condition to be pre-existing?
Generally people in the US fear monger about wait times in Canada as if they are awesome here in the US. They might be better here in the US for a lot of things but we also pay 50% more.
I mean the total cost. Yes you do not pay at the time of service but you still pay for it in the form of taxes. Canada spends about 12% of its GDP on healthcare. The US spends about 19%.
I’m not personally worried about the taxes I’m paying for healthcare.
I’m worried about being financially ruined (myself and my children) by a health event.
1 in 4 of U.S. adults carries medical debt. One in four. Those are lousy roulette odds with a loaded barrel to the head. It makes some of us think harder about doing risky activities like driving a car to work. census.gov/…/who-had-medical-debt-in-united-state…
Personally, I have no sympathy for those making over $578.126.00 per year. Let them pay a lot more, if that’s really necessary (it’s not, but if it is, let them). Hell, I’ll gladly pay more to eliminate the risk of being ruined, if it’s really necessary (it’s not).
And no, as a relatively well off knowledge worker my private insurance does not eliminate the risks. One head injury could:
give me permanent ongoing medical expenses
take away both my ability to work (where I get my health insurance that pays my medical expenses
drastically lower my chances of winning a lawsuit (or even choosing the right representation) against a ln insurance company that doesn’t feel my health merits their expense column.
This isn’t a terrible system for rich people with steady jobs. But none of us are rich people with steady jobs 100% of the time.
This is a huge difference. Plus, even if you do end up paying a similar amount in Canada because you’re very well off (boo-hoo), you also don’t have to deal with the US insurance companies that cannot even accurately tell you which facilities are in network or whatever. It’s just so much simpler and the mental burden of dealing with health care is much less in Canada. You don’t have to worry about massive surprise bills or insurance not covering treatment you receive… It’s just not an issue.
Preaching to the choir, my friend. I think anyone who prefers the American system is either fucking nuts or they are profiting off of it. The US pays 50% more overall to come out worse in most metrics. And you are correct that the additional costs fall on the working class. My healthcare costs were about 19% of my income when my wife and I were in the top 10% of households incomes. Lower income households spend more than that 19% here in the US. The ones in the top 5% he up spend only a small percentage of their incomes on healthcare costs. That is extremely fucked.
Their point was addressing the “$0.00” you quoted. If you’re in Canada, and you pay taxes, some of your taxes go toward the healthcare that everyone benefits from, even if you didn’t have to pay anything out of pocket when receiving services. So even if you indirectly pay $0.01 in healthcare taxes, then it would not come out to “infinity percent more”.
I was more talking about how what percentage of each country’s GDP goes towards healthcare. The US, despite having fewer regulations and supposedly being a more efficient private solution, spends 19% of its GDP on healthcare compared to 12% in Canada. Somehow Republicans are under the delusion that less regulation and more privatization will make it cheaper in the US despite healthcare companies fully admitting that the opposite is true.
In any case where the wait times aren’t extreme in the U.S., you also have to consider the large number of people who don’t even have the opportunity to wait.
Wait times are reduced when people can’t afford to get on the waiting list.
If they want to fairly compare wait times, they need to include in average the infinite wait times for the people who are left out of the system entirely.
Also a Canadian living in the US, and I would tend to disagree. In major US cities, with good health insurance, there are plenty of PCPs, and availability of specialists.
For instance, I had a ganglion cyst that I went to see my PCP for. We decided to give it a couple weeks to see if it would go away by itself. It didn’t, so I messaged him, and was scheduled to see an orthopedic surgeon (probably overkill) within 3 days to have it looked at and drained. Total cost: $0 for PCP; $40 co-pay for the specialist.
Meanwhile, my father in Nova Scotia waited close to a year for a knee replacement surgeon consult and is now waiting for surgery slot, which is expected to be another 6-9 months, despite being in significant pain. That just would not happen in the US.
There are many problems for sure, and I don’t have a universal measure for efficiency, but anecdotally, in my experience, there is just way less waiting in many parts of the US. I also acknowledge how privileged I am to have good insurance, resources to not worry about large out of pocket maxes in an emergency, and to live in a city with some of the best hospital networks in the country.
In my experience the wait times issue has been similar between Canada and the US to see specialists, though admittedly I haven’t had to schedule a major surgery in either place. I will admit that there’s some really nice facilities in the US and stuff too (and some REALLY not so nice facilities… Canadian facilities were consistently good across the board in my experience), but it’s hard to really appreciate them in my experience because it’s really shitty to be worrying about the cost of treatment / dealing with insurance and it also sucks to think about how weirdly exclusive it can be and how many people cannot afford it here. Frankly the insurance and cost issues are huge in my opinion and it makes it kind of weird to talk about because it means almost everybody has different experiences with the US health care system, especially when many Americans think it’s fine that they spend a fortune on insurance because they’ve never really known anything different.
I agree. I think both system have significant flaws, and that is coming from someone for whom the US healthcare system benefits the most (great health insurance, mid-30s, healthy, well-off, very capable of navigating complicated paperwork, and access to some of the best hospitals). I can’t imagine being a lower income, lower educated, aging person with chronic health problems, in a rural flyover state with limited community hospitals. Night and day difference.
On the other hand, some 20% of the total population of Nova Scotia is currently active on the waiting list to get a PCP. You don’t like your PCP? Too bad. You want to get a second opinion? Too bad. Your PCP retires/moves/closes their practice? Too bad. They have tried to plug the gap with allowing pharmacists to prescribe certain meds, and expanding PA/NPs. This is probably better than the alternative of no doctors, but its probably a net negative on the system as a whole compared to properly staffing with physicians.
Overall, it seems like chronic underfunding, and underpay for doctors has led to situation in Nova Scotia in which preventative care, or really, care for anything non-life threatening, has deteriorated quite meaningfully.
I work at a call center, and a few years ago I got moved next to this person when we changed management teams. She was a very nice person in general, but for some reason as the day went on her voice would get louder and louder. I was amazed our manager never said anything as it sounded like she was screaming at the people on the phone by the end of our shift. I thought maybe she was just having a bad day or something so I didn’t make a big deal out of it.
She kept getting louder though.
It got so bad that I was eventually pressing my hands over my headphones because she sounded louder than my own customers I needed it listen to. After about a week of this I’d finally had it, and I tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she could please try to keep her volume down since I couldn’t hear my own callers anymore.
She looked at me like I’d just kicked a puppy or something. She made a HUGE show of gathering up all of her possessions and moving all the way to the other end of our row as far from me as she could get, all in complete silence
I think she actually expected me to come find her and apologize lol but since THAT wasn’t about to happen I lived happily ever after never having to listen to her big fat mouth ever again
“Well, there was a bit of a stir when it was decided that since corporations are people, they could technically run for president. But President Walt Disney-Pepsi-Comcast has done wonders for the economy… given that it’s… now the economy”
Personally I don’t know of any specific research but afaik the reason why our voices sound terrible to us when recorded is because they’re missing the bass that’s transmitted through the skull, i.e. they sound higher pitched on recording. So I’d try increasing the amplitude of the lower frequencies on the EQ, it’ll take a bit of fiddling to get the right balance.
The problem is that we keep jumping up to new major versions where of course there’s all kinds of regressions. We really just need to revert to Web 2.7.3 rev4, now that was a polished release.
True but I feel that the Brits are quite advanced in this area. They’ve got a fantastic public relations department that works tirelessly to maintain a sense of endearment to a family that has all the charisma of a house brick. Not everyone can cut funding for healthcare and simultaneously increase it for a class of super wealthy privileged idiots while keeping the tiny flags waving.
I always took the term ‘bullshit jobs’ to refer to jobs that produce something that society doesn’t really require, and typically only exists because they need someone to deal with the output of someone else’s bullshit job.
Society isn't really good at knowing what it requires. And sometimes it's better to be cautious. Also capitalism breaks down in certain markets, one of which is the "job market".
Any market that involves a lot of players and little oversight will get manipulated like crazy, including the job market. Employers try to counter that, but in the end the people that are best at getting hired for a job get that job, not the people that are best at doing that job. How could it not be?
And that includes the jobs of the people that do the hiring. So it's a market that's rife with inefficiencies.
Half-and-half here (also Germany). Almost everyone I know uses Signal & WhatsApp both. But WA is for bad connectivity and group chats, plus a few (mostly foreigners) holdouts.
I have ONE contact who uses Signal. Yes, it’s a shame but at this point I think that I could convert more people to using Linux than to switching to Signal.
I hear that a lot, it’s so weird, even my mum, dad and aunts (all around 70 years old) use Signal, and that was not my idea (I used to avoid all those fucking phone-number messengers for a few years until I caved in and realized Jabber is not making a return to mainstream …)
Same here. I wonder if there is an easy way to leave an old phone with whatsapp at home and forward the messages to my daily driver. Would prevent the zuck from reading out my contact list at minimum. I know he still has everybody else’s but still.
As a workaround, you can bridge most services to Matrix. I currently bridge Telegram, Signal and SMS to my Matrix server and only need Element on my phone and desktop.
Unfortunately Element is fairly focused on business users, would be cool if they could host bridges for individuals to make the barrier of entry easier.
Not actually fired, but I just resigned from a relatively high paying career position without something lined up.
I work in tech, and some parts of that market are very much in flux due to AI disruption. For this company it led to a shuffle and, in my opinion, a lot of people ending up in roles they shouldn’t be in.
A few things happened during that shuffle. First, I was overlooked for a promotion that otherwise seemed in the bag (to the point where others were equally confused). Ultimately the person who ended up as my boss really should not be where they are. They don’t understand the business and started making other bad decisions without even consulting the team of experts on hand. In fact, they apologized to me for “starting off on the wrong foot”, but the damage was largely done, and they kept making really bad calls anyway – calls which put the team constantly at risk and kept things very inefficient.
And yes, of course they are good friends with the new CEO.
That exacerbated a lot of issues we already had with constantly juggling tasks and chronic understaffing. After that promotion snub, plus being one of the few really holding things together anyway, I realized that the stress of the position entirely outweighed the stress of finding another job. Obviously I also felt like upward mobility was no longer a thing. I was dreading work every morning. I started to get really bad anxiety. I wanted to find something else, but my mental state was such that I didn’t have the drive to seek alternatives or interview while also working at this place. I asked to reduce my weekly workload for a while, and when it wasn’t working too well, I asked to go on leave to try and combat the burnout. New boss was instantly waffling on approval, so I felt I had no other realistic option but resignation.
My wife and I are in a pretty secure financial position, and she’s got her own job that is going well. It is the first time in my life I have resigned from a position without anything lined up, which admittedly does feel weird. Taking some time for better mental health, then to hone a few skills, then will be returning to market.
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