Having experienced both system as well, the Canadian system is much less burdensome, but if I had serious cancer I’d take the US system any day. They throw the kitchen sink and more at you in the US and insurance will pay for most of it.
My grandmothers neighbor is in her 70’s and not great health. She needs a hip transplant and the doctor is basically like “nope, you don’t have many years left, better to prioritize a 50 year old”. Which makes perfect sense from a population perspective but sucks balls at an individual level.
Ehhh. Insurance will pay for what they want to pay. That means some treatments will be completely covered, and other treatments that your doctor really think should happen, won't be approved. Sometimes its because the doctor's out of wack and the insurance is calling bullshit on them (that's good!), sometimes insurance are just cheap (that's bad).
The biggest issue to me is getting far enough to even diagnose the cancer. In the US, they tend to just want to go through as many patients as possible. Maybe toss you some pills, but that's it. It's hard to get doctors to go through the more advanced diagnostics.
I had gallbladder stones for a while and it took FOUR YEARS of every doctor I talked to dismissing it as GERD (wtf) and countless ER visits before one lost patience and did the ultra sound here and there. "Oh, look at that, its not just plain stomach pain".
But who cares about finding the root cause when you can just keep billing patients after patients for GR visits where all you do is take their vitals and prescribe PPIs. If I had cancer, I'd be dead.
But yes, on the other end of the spectrum, my grandmother in Canada almost died because of critical and time sensitive heart surgery she needed that got cancelled and rescheduled over and over and over...
> Having experienced both system as well, the Canadian system is much less burdensome, but if I had serious cancer I’d take the US system any day. They throw the kitchen sink and more at you in the US and insurance will pay for most of it.
Of course this means they'll also push incredibly expensive but dubious interventions for all patients (even those that are clearly terminal).
I have no idea whether Canada etc are better in this regard, but all the incentives line up to treat all patients in the most expensive way possible to the "bitter end." I've seen this personally with terminal patients, resulting in them squandering their final months on brutal and ineffective treatment as they follow that "false hope" to gain some "extra time," but it also means expensive (and high risk) surgery is encouraged way more often than e.g. physical therapy for minor issues.
I guess if you're a very savvy consumer this system could work for the better, because you would only opt for the truly necessary and likely to be effective expensive procedures, but it's incredibly difficult to make clear-eyed decisions in moments of health crises.
My grandmothers neighbor is in her 70’s and not great health. She needs a hip transplant and the doctor is basically like “nope, you don’t have many years left, better to prioritize a 50 year old”. Which makes perfect sense from a population perspective but sucks balls at an individual level.