I was visiting my sister in Toronto and got a sudden high fever and felt terrible. She directly me to a corner clinic and I was seen promptly and diagnosed with mastitis (I was nursing). They treated me, gave me my prescription, and were very very prompt and professional. But I had to pay on the spot.
It wasn’t very high, actually lower than a visit to an American Urgent Care Center would be. Maybe $60 plus $20 for the antibiotics.
Just for comparison, this summer while on a trip to Germany my 9 year old son dislocated his knee. We were seen by 3 different doctors, had x-rays, and physical therapy while he was on crutches. The total cost was 7 Euros (and that was for renting the crutches).
This is no different from Canadians crossing the border to get sweet deals at Borders. It’s just comparison shopping in areas where the markets have unusually noticeable price differences.
UHC, on the other hand, is a matter of legal residency. You can get health care in Ontario with a provincial health card if you live here, and MasterCard, Visa or AMEX if you don’t.
I disagree the US is selective about who they let in. I live in a building full of immigrants all who are here because they are cousin or an uncle or some other type of relateive to someone here who will sponsor them.
I work at hotels most of my life, and many of these people come right over from Mexico or other countries, because they get some relative to sponsor them.
I recall when I was offered a job in Toronto not once but twice, the Canadians refused to let me in. They said, “If a job can be done by a Canadian it should be filled by a Canadian. And it will go empty till we find one.”
As long as you have a relative it’s pretty easy to get in to the USA. All you need is a sponsor and once you’re here, no one is gonna check on you, unless you’re very unlucky.
Mexicans come to the USA 'cause they can blend in better, plus the weather is better. It’s rough to live on the streets of Edmonton in the winter.
Countries like Aussie and New Zealand are able to restrict immigration so well because they are so far away. Even if you could land into Aussie you’d be landing from Indonesia and in middle of nowhere. Only Darwin (100.000 people) is a city of any size close to a place of potential illegal immigrants.
Wow - my appendectomy (with perforation due to peritonitis) would cost me $430.
Too bad mine’s already out - such a bargain.
You contradict yourself. Take Manuel and Pedro. Manuel’s brother and sister-in-law, and their widowed mother, live here already. Pedro has no living relatives. Manuel meets a criterion that Pedro does not – he has family willing to house and feed him while he finds work. So he can qualify under the “relative who is a legal immigrant and is willing to sponspr him” clause, while Pedro cannot.
Selectivity is not exclusively “does he have an M.D. degree? Is she a trained architect?” Pedro doesn’t qualify under one criterion that Manuel does.
And don’t forget that there are a LOT of Hispanic Americans, both from the traditional Hispanic communities within a few of the 50 states and also from Puerto Rico, who are free to move elsewhere in the U.S. – because they are U.S. citizens the same as the rest of us.
The Visa Waiver Program allows visits of up to 90 days (prior to its introduction in 1986, anyone visiting the US needed a visa). For Canada (obviously not on the USA’s VWP), it’s six months.
Are you talking about legal immigration? Your comment about being checked on implies otherwise.
Legally immigrating to the United States is quite difficult, and for the vast majority of people in the world completely impossible. Immigration due to family is limited to direct relationships (parents, children and siblings), and even then is extremely limited due to quotas. For example, for Mexico for most classifications they are currently only starting to process applications from 1995 or earlier (http://travel.state.gov/visa/frvi/bulletin/bulletin_4659.html). The only immediate category (not listed in the Visa Bulletin) is marriage to a US citizen, parents of a 21 years or older US citizen or 21 years or younger children of a US citizen.
Legally immigrating due to employment is just as difficult - it is extremely likely that you would run into exactly the same issues attempting to come to the United States as you did attempting to go to Canada. There are provisions for it but in essence they want to see something similar: is there no American who can do the job instead? The requirements for the H1-B working visa (also with a quota) are slightly less onerous but to stay permanently would typically require the company to prove that it tried to hire locals but none were available.
If you are talking about pretending to visit temporarily but overstaying your visa then that is a different story. I find it hard to believe you wouldn’t be subject to intense questioning about your ties to Mexico if you were getting a visa to visit family.
The thing I remember about working on the Schedule is that each procedure is not inclusive of other procedures–that is, your appendectomy would indeed cost $430, but that would involve only your appendectomy. There would be other charges in the Schedule pertaining to other necessary services accompanying that appendectomy: the anaesthesia, the sedatives, any preparation, etc. etc. etc. The all-in cost of services, medications, and people would probably still be a bargain compared to US costs, but the bottom line for an appendectomy would not be the low, low price of $430. 
Of course, you’re picking from the apple bucket and comparing it to the orange bucket.
Immigration via family is easier in Canada than the United States. For one, they will accept your domestic partner, and I believe they are a lot more flexible in how extended you can get with your family to bring them in under your original immigration scheme.
Of course, the original immigrant needed to qualify (in the US) either a) through a work permit, b) through the diversity lottery, c) through an amnesty at some point in the past.
there are public policy reasons for keeping families together, which is why both countries are lax in allowing you to bring your (extended) family with you.
Immigration via work is probably more difficult in the United States. Not only does an employer have to hire you, but unless you are an athlete or a Nobel Laureate, you need to go through “labor certification” which is the same thing you were subjected to in Canada - they are not going to accept an immigrant for a work permit if there is a willing and able American or Canadian to do the work (I’m not so sure Canadian work permits have some requirement that the job “cannot” be done by a Canadian period, it’s probably like the us in that the job cannot be done by an available Canadian)
Canadian work-based immigration is easier because they covet and have economic room for a lot more “marginal professionals” - i.e. those with advanced skills, but not PhD level advanced. They’re a country of only 30 million, remember, and they have to fund a more generous suite of social programs.
Also, Canadian permanent residency can be obtained by completing your post-secondary education in Canada. Here, once you’re finished your degree, you’re told to screw off back to where you came from unless you have a job offer with a work permit.
Regarding work visas in Canada, they can be made very easy when a company goes looking for people itself. My husband’s company was crying for workers in 2007 and 2008, so they went shopping in Germany, Mexico, and the UK and recruited skilled workers there (mostly carpenters). They went to Ottawa first to take care of the red tape, and it sounds like it was very easy for the workers to come here and work in this situation.
As a young person with an undergrad degree in science, no major health problems, etc I still didn’t qualify by the points system. I think I came up a few points short.
So its not as easy as you may think to move to Canada.
This is absolutely untrue. There is no category of US immigration based on your relationship to a cousin or uncle. The number of family-based immigration visas is a set number every year. The priority for who gets these visas is based on what relationship you have to the US citizen or legal resident, with spouses of citizens highest on the list. BUT, each country only gets so many visas, so if you’re trying to come into the US from a country that has a lot of immigrants applying every year (ie- Mexico) the wait is long because the number of available visas for Mexico goes quickly.
The US has the same restrictions for employment-based visas (which is different from family-based visas) that Canada has, BTW.
You can disagree all you want about how restrictive US immigration law is, but the above post clearly shows me that you have no idea what you’re talking about re: how it really works.
Technically the way that it is done is with a world wide quota, with an additional stipulation that no one country can use up more than 7% of that quota. Right now that means long waits for everyone, but even longer waits if you are from a high volume country like Mexico, China or India. It seems that Mexico has much longer delays on family immigration while China and India have longer delays on employment immigration. That sort of makes sense.
FWIW, when my parents (who are residents of Saskatchewan) were working to bring my German grandmother there to live with them, my grandmother had to get some sort of medical clearance to be allowed to immigrate. Another family that we know of was unable to bring their grandmother over because her health was not good. I’m not sure if that’s an impossible bar to hurdle, but there do appear to be some health restrictions/holdups for potential immigrants. Which makes sense, because a country with UHC wouldn’t want to add a lot of sick people to the population.
Don’t forget an important point - sick people who haven’t paid into the system all their lives. Canadians are not completely altruistic; I don’t mind paying for someone else’s healthcare now, but I expect to use the system in my own turn, so I consider the money I pay in now to be payments for my own future treatment. I don’t look at someone’s sick grandma coming here from another country and using Canadian healthcare with the same equanimity.
ETA: Parachuting into the system - that’s the concept I was trying to convey.
This happens in the US too. My father-in-law is a naturalized citizen and my mother-in-law is a permanent resident. I don’t think my fil worked in the US; my mil did for a period of time (maybe a dozen years at low paying jobs). Both are recipients of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicade. Despite never contributing, my fil now gets thrice weekly dialysis treatments, a nurse 5-days a week, tons of prescriptions, etc.
The US does have a form of UHC - you just have to be old. Then you can be treated as well, if not better, than any UHC system.
Was it covered by your insurance when you got back home?
My Ontario health coverage provides only very limited overage if I am traveling outside of Canada. Mainly emergency stuff that is acute and requiring immediate care and usually not enough to cover the whole bill (they will pay Ontario rates, so if I’m in a country where they jack up the prices…).
So when traveling, I have additional travel insurance from my workplace benefits, or I can buy a travel insurance policy through various programs like CAA (Canada’s version of AAA).