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| Mara Jade Skywalker wrote: |
| So here's my question, then...to the Canadians: How long do you have to wait to see a doctor? I'd always heard the free care causes a bottleneck. But I don't know if that's true, so I wonder how it works for you guys. |
We have issues with that sometimes, but that's from an unrelated shortage of doctors.
I can usually make an appointment with either my doctor or someone else from her office (there's a couple of great Nurse-Pracititioners too). But if I need immediate-but-not-life-threatening care, but can't make an appointment with my doctor, there are great walk-in clinics everywhere. I can see a doctor within an hour or two.
The Emergency Room depends on a lot of factors (urgency, time of day, etc.) I've stayed in the waiting room or a hospital room for 8 hours before, but there were always people with greater need ahead of me.
In Ontario (the province where I live), there is also a great service called Telehealth, where you can phone them up and speak to a Registered Nurse live. They'll help find whatever medical resource you need, so you're not wasting your time in a clinic or the ER when you just need some over-the-counter meds and a few days off work (or to tell you to go to the ER, even if you think it's not so bad).
And all of these things come out of city, provincial, or federal taxes, as appropriate (each has a different mandate: hospitals and doctors are paid from provincial, city does things like vaccine deployment, federal does larger Public Health type things). Most Canadians then have insurance on top of that to cover prescriptions or fees not traditionally covered by the government (a lot of cosmetic procedures aren't covered, for example; neither are things like Physiotherapy, Chiropractics, or Optometry.)
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It was the year of fire… the year of destruction… the year we took back what was ours.
It was the year of rebirth… the year of great sadness… the year of pain… and the year of joy.
It was a new age. It was the end of history. It was the year everything changed.
The year is 2261.
The place: Babylon 5.
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