dW

Ignorance & Laziness

I’ve got a lot of respect for Veerle Pieters and read her blog very often. Her newest post struck a chord with me. Why? Because people outside of North America, especially Europeans believe any healthcare system different from their own is inferior. We get this a lot especially in the United States (that’s another day), but this was about the Canadian healthcare system. I happen to know quite a bit about it from reading up on it, along with discussions with my good friend, Jeff King.

It’s on those occasions you suddenly realize that all those other countries may be bigger but that they could learn a lot from our healthcare system. In Belgium the Doctor is only a phone call away no matter if you stay in a hotel or not and that’s what is really missing here. I feel for so many other friends who are now suffering from the same thing too. It’s like a virus that invaded the conference in one hard swoop.

Not to sound insensitive as the flu is a bad thing to have, but Canada has a nice healthcare system. It’s not considered the best, but the WHO’s considerations and what’s actually the best are two different things. Canada has a partly socialist and partly private healthcare system, so there’s many things that are free for Canadians and foreigners, too. Excuse me, but there’s 6,554 healthcare facilities around the Renaissance hotel. I’m sure there’s one you could have gone to. Oh! There’s a hospital WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE FROM THE HOTEL. I’m sorry, but I’ve never not been sick enough to go to a hospital. In your case it was laziness to go to the hospital and not lack of healthcare as you describe it. Being sick is no excuse for laziness, especially when you need to go to the hospital. Also, hospital care in Canada as far as I know is 100% free. Also from my experiences calling my own doctor in the United States I’d have to assume it’s not hard to call a doctor in Vancouver, but like everything else you do need to know the number. That always helps.

Also, you mentioned the size of Canada compared to your own country, Belgium. The larger the population, the more people has to be taken care of. That’s pretty simple. The U.S. with the largest economy in the world by a longshot doesn’t have enough money to provide ample and equal socialist healthcare to over 300 million people, so Canada certainly doesn’t have enough to have a full one as well for their people. Despite the shortcomings of Canada’s healthcare system you could have gotten proper healthcare.

Even if you couldn’t get it for free you certainly had the money to fly half-way around the world to attend a conference. You would have had money for a doctor visit and some medicine to reduce the effects of having the flu. Flu is a virus, so a doctor is only able to give you medication to reduce effects, so to save money and the doctor’s wasted time it would have been better to get a friend to go to the nearest drug store and purchase some flu medicine over the counter after discussing with the pharmacist or whoever’s there as what their opinion was as to what to take. Common sense does come a long way.