It's called triage. If you go in with a splinter you're going to have to wait behind the guy that came in after you with a piece of rebar through his skull.
Lots of people don't understand that it isnt a deli counter where you take a number and are called in order.
Many of these conservative "studies" compare wait times between Canadian booboos and American traumas without explicitly calling it out, and that's not a fair comparison.
Lots of people don’t understand that it isnt a deli counter where you take a number and are called in order.
Conservatives tend to be stupid and ignorant, yes.
In the US, if the wait time is ever quicker it’s because a lot of people who SHOULD be there just died at home or at least tried to tough it out and will live with those consequences for the rest of their lives.
And yea, conservatives(lowercase, to not exuse anyone not in the Conservative party) are constantly fucking over our public instiutions. That includes healthcare, and frankly those politicians doing the damage are just murderers for hire. We have to do better, but at least we aren’t the US.
I remember when they sent me to an hospital from the clinic because it was possible I had something really concerning. I passed in front of everyone. It took 1 minute the second I talked to the reception. When they figured out it wasn't lethal, it took some time... you know... to take care of the dying people.
Yep, there's also priority insurance in EU, so they inflate the waiting time to make you pay more for insurance. They are definately trying to go the US way.
And they wouldn’t even give you anything for the pain because the sacklers pushed opiates relentlessly got no consequences and now everyone is screwed
You can tell these people have never visited an ER in the US when they post shit you could tell was a lie just by accidentally glancing into any hospital window.
They don't care. They just believe they have enough money to get priority in a for-profit system, at the expense of those who have less money but actually need urgent care.
Last time I went to the ER with an actual emergency and they took me right in... no wait. So yeah, I'll take it.
Yeah but like... Where do you live I guess
Edit (clarification):
It's just, unless you include that information, how do we know which one you're saying is fine?
"Pedo Daddy told me to hate Canada so now I hate Canada."
Ah yes, this classic lie.
I fondly remember back in the olden days of news-papers reading an article that very fairly and balancedly compared ER wait times in the US to specialist referral times in Canada to show how badly socialized medicine was failing. More than zero people read that article and thought "USA! USA!" then went on to vote and share their ideas with people.
Then there was a big splash with a """study""" that actually compared ER times to ER times and the US freaking dominated!!! Of course, if you read past the headline you'd find cherry picked cases of "bleeding to death" in the USA versus "sniffles" in Canada.
Point being, there are many ways to lie and these bastards will try all of them.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
You can use statics to prove anything. 39% of people know that
In America, I pay for health insurance that I can't use because I can't find a fucking doctor! Seriously, I've been trying to get a PCP for years but everyone I call is not taking patients. I'm on several different waiting lists.
if you are waiting 12 hours in the ER then you are probably there for a runny nose or something equally silly.
Triage is a thing that exists, and ensures that people get attention in the order they need it. . and when an ER is full of a mass causality event, your skinned knee or runny nose is not a priority.
I went to the ER in the US for an infected gallbladder full of stones, it was so bad I had to be hospitalized for almost a week. I was in the ER waiting room in the fetal position for literally hours after a nurse took my vitals before a doctor saw me, there were a couple other people in the waiting room. I nearly died. Over $20k bill after insurance.
I've also gone to the same ER with relatively mild UTI, I peed blood and fainted from the sight but otherwise didn't really need the ER. They saw me immediately, and it was very busy.
Triage is a thing, whether they do it properly is another thing.
Also, you don't know what happened an hour before you showed up. Triage doesn't mean a serious case doesn't have to wait or a minor one does.
Canadian here its not silly, you can wait 12+ hours for very serious conditions (as I have once, I realize this is anecdotal).
This doesn't mean its worse than in the states. I understand on average we are doing better healthcare wise than the states (interms of cost and mortality). However for the well insured in the states I believe the care is better.
Yet another issue with being so close to the states our health care suffers because our corrupt politicians see your system and drag us closer to it. You all also attract doctors away from us.
you are probably there for a runny nose or something equally silly.
It's silly to go to the ER for a runny nose if you have better options, like a family doctor with whom you can get appointments within a few days. Sadly, a lot of Americans don't have health care coverage and have to go to the ER for "silly" things because they don't have other options.
But we're FREE, praise Supply Side Jesus!
Canada needs to stop taking these comments seriously and learn to stop punching down on the USA. Our healthcare system still has a lot of room for improvement.
And the reason for that is the aggressive privatization efforts done over decades by conservatives and many liberals.
I.e. Americanization
If it's so bad in Canada, and so great here, why is nobody in Canada demanding to switch to that great American last place healthcare?
Some people are, but universal Healthcare is almost universally accepted in Canada.
So they debate goes around whether there should be a two tiered system with private hospitals/clinics so rich people can skip the queue for surgeries, etc.
That's a trap.
There are unfortunately a bunch of right wing idiots in canada who absolutely are :(
Hate to have to repeat this.
My late dad had a fell at home and broke his femur in two places.
Half an hour after his home fall alert was triggered, a team of paramedics was at his home. They got there before I arrived and had already stabilised and immobilised him.
An hour later he was admitted in ER, got checked and X-rayed.
Four hours later he was in the OR room, where they replaced half his femur with a piece of titanium. Then he was at the hospital for one week and then sent to a recovery clinic.
He paid zero € for all the process, including ambulance, intervention, ‘hardware’ and recovery.
Oh, this is Spain, not precisely the richest country in the EU.
Of course, if you go to ER because you’re sneezing, you will have to wait. But if you go to a private clinic using your private insurance you have to wait too…
It’s called triage. We do the exact same thing in the usa. And that’s the case whether you have insurance or not. They don’t even know if you have insurance at this step of it, to be honest.
Oh yea, but in the states is going to cost you a car or 5.
They do know if you have insurance in most cases but it's against federal law to discriminate based on insurance coverage based on EMTALA and the civil penalty is over $100,000.
I went to the ER with heart problems in the US. Waited 12 hours in a mostly empty waiting room.
Canadian. Recently injured, reasonably severely.
Ambulance on scene, admitted immediately, consult, imaging, initial treatment and out in 3 hours. Multiple regular follow ups and imaging - none of which took more than an hour.
If you’re sick or injured you get seen pretty quickly.
As someone else put it - the system is really good at solving acute problems and saving your life.
Keeping you healthy - that’s more up to you (than it should be). It’s not close to perfect but I’d pick it any day over whatever it is in Lake Americaland.
Correct. Moreover many provinces have seen flagrant de-funding and de-prioritization of health care as right wing grifters attempt to purposefully erode public healthcare in a bid to prop up private care. This has led to availability shortages which in turn cause more people to seek ER assistance than they otherwise would, and hence the long wait times.
My hope is we collectively pull our heads out of our asses and see how fucked things are in the US and reverse course.
If you're waiting 12 hours in the triage area of the emergency department, then you probably should have either gone to your primary doc, or an urgent clinic.
12 hours means either the waiting area is unusually full of extremely unstable patients, or you are especially stable yourself.
I get that not everyone has access to different levels of care, but urgent clinics exist to take the load off the emergency departments.
I saw an analysis about this a few years ago where they showed that the wait time for care in Canada was generally less than the wait time in America for most stuff.
Certain things like non-emergency (but important) surgeries could take longer to schedule in Canada.
But that was years ago. Probably both sides have had changes since then.
The most important takeaway is that if you think wait times would definitely be worse with socialized medicine, you have fallen for conservative propaganda, you idiot.
If Canadians waits in an ER, that means that what they had wasn't life threatening and people with worse conditions took the priority over them.
If an American waits in an ER, it could be that their insurance company is delaying everything and hopes that they die so they don't have to pay for treatment.
This was once the case in the US prior to EMTALA laws being introduced in 1986. Which is pretty dystopian, even if it's not the case today.
It wasn't so much the insurance company though. It was private hospitals dumping uninsured patients into public ones without stabilizing care even if they were actively dying because they didn't want to absorb the cost. Essentially pure evil / end stage capitalism.
They are educated in triage, which is the only sensible way to handle emergency responses. A man with a sore throat should never take priority over a kid with a broken arm.
People think they are paying for medical attention, but what they are really paying for is their minor problems being taken more seriously than major problems that poorer people have.
Private for-profit healthcare, even in conjunction with public healthcare, is a blight upon humanity contradicting everything modern medicine stands for.
Italy, socialized healthcare:
Last year I got involved in a crazy car accident that left me with serious injuries.
1 hour after the accident I already had the first MRI done, a specialist surgeon saw me, determined that my injuries needed a second MRI and a CT scan but that they were not life threatening. A couple of hours later I had all the required tests done and assigned a bed in a room to start recovering. 3 days later I had back surgery and some more days in the hospital to rest. My injuries were not life threatening but the OR was ready for me from the moment they called the hospital saying they were bringing a multi-trauma patient.
In a few months from now, I'll have to go back to remove the bars they put in my back to keep the vertebrae in place.
The total cost of the whole ordeal was exactly 0€ (unless we want to count the book I asked for to read something during my stay).
Fuck the US healthcare vigorously with a spiked stick. If this happened there, I'd be better dead because the debt I'd have now would be insane.
The first thing I noticed when I was over in europe 30 years ago, is the hospital waiting rooms are small compared to American standards in larger cities.
The reason: routine non-emergency care is handled at the clinics because those are free/inexpensive too. So emergency rooms tend to have less traffic as people don't wait as long for care. Earlier intervention = better health outcomes.
The regular clinics had very short wait times. You could get a routine appointment within a few days. The clinic was busy but you weren't waiting for 2-3 hours for a regular appointment. (Maybe 15 minutes).
As an US American living in Germany: socialized healthcare or death. Fuck the US system. It's designed to torture you to add money to a billionaire's pocket.
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