U.S. President Donald Trump says Canadians would have “much better” health coverage if Canada became the 51st state.
He made the remarks during a briefing in North Carolina, where he toured areas struck by Hurricane Helene on Friday.
“I would love to see Canada be the 51st state,” he said. “The Canadian citizens, if that happened, would get a very big tax cut – a tremendous tax cut – because they are very highly taxed.”
“They’d have much better health coverage. I think the people of Canada would like it,” said the president.
He’s preying on some real issues with our system, such as the chronic lack of primary preventative care for the majority of the population in places like Montreal. When it takes months to see a doctor who rushes you, the private options prevalent in the US start sounding attractive.
So let’s make sure this fool has no leg to stand on by properly funding our public healthcare system, treating our healthcare workers right, and by reducing the barriers to the recognition of foreign healthcare workers’ credentials.
That just sounds exactly like the US system though but you have to pay for it. My girlfriend has been dealing with medical stuff lately and was being bounced around between places with a month or more waiting time between each one. And whenever something came up that she would want to ask her primary care provider about it would be a few months for an appointment. The US system as far as I can tell doesn’t really have much better wait times yet people still act like it’s better here when my experience is it very much isn’t.
Isn’t private healthcare still an option? Not that it should be the case, but I’d much rather pay a thousand a month (which is cheap) for my family to have prompt access to primary care and virtually nothing (?) for hospital trips, specialist etc.
I’m not sure how it works in places with UHC, and my job pays 100% of my insurance now, but a few years ago I was paying $1200 a month where my employer split the cost and still had to pay $300 for every doctor visit for me and about $50 for my son. Anytime any of us were in the hospital we had to ask at every step how much something would cost because we’ve ended up with a few hospital bills totaling up to crippling debt that we’ll never get out of.
Even with my insurance costing me nothing now I still pay ~$200 for every doctor visit because we never hit out deductible of ~$6000 which keeps getting raised every few months. We definitely could hit that deductable but we’d still end up owing money for every little thing. I avoid going to the doctors because we can’t afford it. We have to save for any tests/procedures at this point, I’ve been putting off an echo and stress test that I’m supposed to get every 6 months for about a year and a half, my heart medication just doubled in price, an ultrasound for my pregnant wife cost us $800 last month and for some reason it didn’t apply towards our deductible.
Paying 1k$ a month for doctors is completely ridiculous in Canada. I’m comfortable right now but that would completely break my budget.
It is an option I guess for the rich rich, but for the vast majority that’s just not a thing that we’d consider “reasonable”, much less “cheap”.
Employer health insurance covers dental, drugs, eyes though. So people that don’t have it struggle and that’s not nothing. Which is why the government just passed some limited coverage but it’s not universal as it should be.
So you see: completely different mindset.
Yeah, in BC when we used to have premiums it was only $75/mo and if I remember correctly it scaled up from $0 if you made below about $10000 to the full $75 around $30000.