Problems with Canadian Healthcare

Emergency rooms can't treat people in a timely fashion

There are Walk-In Clinics and Urgent Care Centres, but when you call a service like Telehealth, all too often they tell you to go to the emergency room even if it's not life or death. It feels like there's a big gap for problems that lie between making an appointment with your family doctor for 2 weeks from now or rushing to the hospital.

If you have a complex problem, let's hope it doesn't get worse in say, the 6 months you have to wait...

Chronic health conditions can lead to depression and anxiety (among other conditions). Stress and poor mental health will show up in poor physical health (e.g. compromised immune system). These are treated as silos, and separate, but they aren't.

Health care is delivered by the provinces, which get funding from the federal government in such a way that in theory, the quality of healthcare available to a Canadian citizen is equal in all provinces. The provinces cry out for more funding, but often don't deliver the care needed to the citizens, resulting in the Federal government not wanting to deliver more funding without accountability and/or transparency on how the money is being spent, which seems fair, but in the resulting delays, health care doesn't improve.

Canadians fear private health care as the end result is thought to be a slippery slope where the quality of the health care is dependent on your wallet and the less financially blessed suffer. I'm not sure how many Canadians realize how much private health care is already in our systems, or that there are already effectively 2 tiers - for example, you can pay to have a private room in the hospital, which will let you rest and recuperate better than if you had a room-mate.

When for-prof surgical centres open and wait times don't significantly improve.... it's bad news...

But not as bad as when there is conflicting data, which only adds to the ambiguity and fear and prevents moving forward with practical solutions.

Canada sometimes struggles to retain doctor's who go to the US where they can make more money. While this is a difficult problem to address, the BC goverment recently revised doctors' compensation so that the services they provide will better serve the public. Basically, not every hour of a doctor's time has equal value to them in the form of compensation, so they will spend their time in a way that is optimal for their income, which might not be the optimal for delivering health care.

While dying with dignity is an easy cause to get behind, there are already multiple cases of disabled/ill citizens being coerced (either through influence and pressure, or lack of support) into choosing Euthanasia.