Eh, maybe it depends where you live or what insurance you have, but my son got prophylactic rabies vaccinations for a close encounter with bats about a year ago, and i asked him what he paid out of pocket, and his reply was “i don’t recall, so possibly $0”. He certainly recalled the discomfort and nuisance of doing it.
Sadly, I’m old enough that “might use your healthcare” is a reason many countries don’t want me to immigrate.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading from UK residents, expat or not, and I think for my current situation (Medicare, suburb in major metro area) I would likely fare better here than in the UK or Ireland, in terms of cost, choice, and wait times.
But I’m sure many others would do better under NHS.
Yeah, I’m sure it does. My work insurance isn’t great, so if I had chosen to go the prophylactic rabies vaccination route after my bat encounter last November, I’m guessing it would not have been cheap, though maybe not as bad as the video made it out to be.
Still, medical tourism is definitely a thing with more serious or involved procedures, and it’s just insane to me that any medical procedure can be so much more expensive here in the states that it’s cheaper to fly to another country, get the procedure done, and spend recovery time there.
In the US rabies Prophylactic treatment is notoriously expensive.
The HRIG shot can be $5000 w/o insurance. (Your weight determines the cost breakdown)
Then there’s more shots after.
It might be cheaper to fly somewhere else to get them. I wouldn’t take the chance on an international flight to get me there in a timely manner. The big shot has to be given pretty immediately.
You do you, if I didn’t have insurance I’d just have to finance it and pay it out. I doubt very seriously a reputable hospital system would deny you the care. Could happen I guess. Some places are shady.
There are programs that can help.
But no, I get bit by an suspected rabies carrier I’m gonna get to the nearest ER and hope for the best.
(And yes the treatment is uncomfortable)
Ouch, the current processing times for spousal permanent residence applications is 15-21 months (for outside of Quebec). A lot has changed in the past few years. My wife received hers in 6 months when she applied back in 2023.
I’m off to view some properties overseas next week, and hope to be out of this embarrassment of a country by the end of the year. Fingers crossed!
Japan is making it more difficult to obtain investment visas, mostly as a reaction to the influx of Chinese.
It’s also more difficult to obtain permanent residency and other visas.
Good luck! You may need to follow up several times before you get a human who actually reads your message and doesn’t just reply “please check with your courier company to confirm package delivery.” Or at least that was my initial experience with my first application, filed during the pandemic.
FWIW my husband’s was just approved and the processing time was more like 6 months, too. (Outland; processing times inside Canada are much longer but supposedly the emphasis is going to shift this year to processing inland ones more quickly. We shall see, I guess.)
Sounds like a good reason for a Canadian Dopefest, when you get here! Keep us informed.
I recently discovered I’m eligible for Croatian citizenship, since one pair of great grandparents were born there. The Mrs. and I will visit the village they came from when we do our Danube cruise/wandering across Hungary and Croatia trip this May.
I’m sure it’ll take years and lots of document searches and money spent on Croatian lawyers specializing in this, but the idea appeals to me on a certain level. I always considered myself an American of Dutch ancestry, but it is only that tiny Croatian 1/8 of my ancestry that gives me a shot at any foreign citizenship. And and EU country and everything, huzzah!
I haven’t started the process yet, but we’ll see how I feel about it after the trip
My great grandparents referred to themselves either as Austrians (as they were part of the Austro-Hungarian empire when the emigrated in 1902) or Slavonians (that being the subregion of Croatia they were from).
Thanks! We are making a quick trip in May/June to activate his PR, but plans after that are very much still up in the air.
One of my closest childhood friends just completed the process, and it definitely has its quirks. He had nearly the most straightforward possible case (mother born and raised there, reasonably fluent in the language) and it still took around 2 years. I imagine that timeline has only gotten longer since he started.
Unfortunately, my ancestors (great-grandparents, grandparents) all came over to the US from what is now Ukraine, Russia, and Latvia. Well, Latvia might be okay. 
Good to hear. I had inferred this (citizenship not only through a parent who was the first generation born outside Canada, but also a grandparent as the first generation born outside Canada and with a parent as the second such generation) as a logical consequence of a recent change to law, but wasn’t able to find explicit conformation from available sources online.
For the record, we were discussing it in this thread:
I have a Canadian great-grandparent as well and alerted an aunt who is big on genealogy to this change in law to see if she might have certain records (birth certificates, marriage certificates, etc) as I was mulling trying to prove up my (possible) citizenship and file an application. The down side is that she does not have all the necessary documenta. The upside, though, is she has the ability and interest to get them and is in fact planning to apply for proof of Canadian citizenship herself through the same ancestor (her grandparent). If it works, then I would only need to take what she used, less her own birth certificate, and add in my father’s birth certificate and my own.
And to think, I once mocked Canada’s national anthem (on the snopes board, way way back).
Too Russian-adjacent for my tastes. I don’t judge the likelihood of a Russian invasion to be high. But the current chaos in that part of the world would give me pause. The combo of Putin’s well-documented hubris and aggression with Trump’s well-documented lack of respect towards NATO and intermittent Putin enabling is worrying.
Even if it’s a low chance of happening, living through a war and attempted annexation would suck.
It may be getting worse. When my son married a US citizen here in Canada last summer the immigration paperwork was already in progress and I don’t think it took much more than a year to get permanent residency status and thus become eligible for employment and health care. But the fees and the services of an immigration lawyer amounted to a fair chunk of cash.
But it could be an EU citizenship, with the right to move elsewhere in the EU. Not necessarily immediately without bureaucratic hurdles, depending on where you wanted to move to, and there’d be the language issue in either case, but not impossible.
I think that they give conservative times on the IRCC website, which is nice.
When we applied the wait was 9-12 months for both inland and outland applications. Coming from a first world English speaking county with a 20+ year marriage probably made our application pretty straight forward. We were on several forums and Facebook groups during our application process and most issues seemed to be with arranged marriages, new marriages, common law, or people needing documents translated into English. We didn’t need to provide pictures of our wedding, letters from friends, or any other proof that our relationship was legit.
Reading comments online from people who want to move, but can’t, is pretty sad. No one likes to be told that Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc. don’t want middle aged people with only a high school diploma.