Americans Living in Canada Comment on Health Care...

A recent survey of some 310 Americans who have experienced use of health care services in both the U.S. and Canada produced expected results. The full survey results are available here.

The overall result had 74% rating the overall quality of U.S. health care as excellent or good, while 50% of the same group gave Canadian health care a similar rating.

The nod was given to U.S. health care in the areas of accessibility, timeliness, quality, and available technology. Canada scored higher in the areas of personal cost of both health care and pharmaceuticals. Obviously, the government pays the costs of permissible care in Canada, so it was expected that personal financial exposure would be limited.

Wait times in Canada were comparatively quite long with people citing too few specialists and too little government funding.

As government funding was exhausted in Canada, services were rationed by imposition of longer wait times and cancelled surgeries.

This group had experienced U.S. health care within two to five years of the time of the survey and had been covered by Canadian health care since the time of their arrival in that country. The respondents were scattered across the provinces with higher concentrations where the population was greater.