My relative was looking at moving to Vancouver and felt that it was a prohibitively long wait. I think they were expecting that it would end up resulting in trips to the US to get the necessary care in a convenient timeline.
I have no direct experience with it so I can't give any anecdotes. I would assume there are wait times to see specialists for referrals and the surgeries themselves, and I would imagine depending on the province they could be into the year+ range which I agree is unacceptable. That being said I went back to that initial post and you said your relative is beginning with hormone therapy while considering surgical options. With my 20 minutes of research (take with a grain of salt) it appears that most provinces require you to be on hormones for at least 12 months before surgery regardless, which to me seems reasonable (I could be wrong and this might be wholly unnecessary) because some people may be satisfied with the results from just HRT.
Ultimately I'm not sure it's a great dunk or some hilarious grand irony. The response from me and presumably your socialist relative would be "yeah austerity sucks, and it's really unfortunate that decades of Canadian neoliberal governments have slashed health care funding by using the spectre of American private healthcare to manage discontent with the obviously underfunded system".
We got a little grumbling in this thread. It is one of the tricky things about universal healthcare, that you bump into these kinds of political issues, where one person is upset about being in a waiting line for knee surgery behind transgender surgery.
It really isn't a political issue here in any meaningful capacity. For example, the poster you quoted went on rambling about Venezuela and then essentially offered a "well I don't love it but it is what it is" to gender confirmation surgeries being offered. I am extremely skeptical that deep down anyone genuinely believes they are "behind" someone in a waiting list for a knee replacement because of a gender confirmation surgery, and even in this most deeply cynical era of politics no Canadian party has touched it.
It is what it is. I don't like that Canadian governments at all levels continue to prioritize building roads and highways for private cars over public transit and inter-city rail. I don't like that three levels of government are funneling $60B to the Irving family to overpay by 4-5 times for ships that are functionally identical to existing British or French-Italian designed ships we could have bought instead or built under license. For some reason though, my concerns or the hypothetical concerns of people like me aren't enough to concern troll about military procurement or highway expansion, but the spectre of a guy wearing a MAGA hat in a rural Michigan diner is an issue for a program that for most people will involve routine checkups and minor procedures. And if we're talking resentment, I think being completely unable to afford care at all would be a bigger driver of resentment than waiting for a knee replacement and choosing to blame some other procedure arbitrarily.
It does seem that
each healthcare system has its tradeoffs. I don't like the Canadian waiting lines.
And I don't like American wait times which can range from low to a lifetime. What I reject about this wait time argument is the premise there are much lower or no wait times in the US for health care, when that's only true (to the extent it even is true, in certain measures and procedures it's not true for reasons I'll get into later with a little zinger) because you're completely eliminating those who are priced out from the data. Just looking at the graph of spending relative to GDP in that Vox piece should be pretty damning if we're talking about trade-offs, no? What trade-off is worth the highest health spending in the world with near-bottom of the industrialized world health outcomes?
You're already spending as much or more public money on health care than most other countries are for very good universal systems and then spending about the same amount privately. For that amount of money America should have the best gold-plated universal health care system the world has ever seen! Instead the trade-off is an
American life expectancy in the mid 30s between Cuba and Lebanon and paying exorbitant amounts of money to a suffocating bureaucracy of insurance companies, lawyers, and marketing parasites who provide zero value to patients. Canada (a 20% poorer country by GDP/capita with less doctors per capita) pays half as much to be in the low teens with universal coverage.
To indulge the aforementioned little zinger, something close to 70% of Canadian family doctors/GPs work out of their own private practices (meaning they own their own office/business and treat the public then bill the government) or in small clinics with a handful of offices while in the US that number is almost flipped with close to that number in hospitals or larger health centres. Turns out it's a lot easier for a doctor to run their own practice when there's only one provincial insurer to bill, and both sides don't need an army of lawyers and marketers. All they really need is a secretary, and that does a lot for patient choice.
For example, I live in a small ~10k pop suburb of the Halifax metro area of around 400k, which is not a particularly large or wealthy city. There are 11 walk-in medical clinics within 10km of my house, and they're all in suburbs without even getting into the actual city of Halifax where there's a dozen+ more. I could go to any of these clinics and see a doctor with my provincial health card, and walk out without paying a dime or filling out any paperwork. How's that for choice? Do we include all the time spent navigating bureaucracy and driving past empty clinics to get to one that's in-network as "wait time?"
