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SW Ontario | Like anything, there are advantages and disadvantages.
As others have mentioned, our healthcare system is actually private enterprises who bill the government directly, as long as you present your health card. If you don't or can't produce it then you will get billed.
Am I happy with it? Well, sort of. Around here it is mostly a rural area with most small towns under 10k population. Most of these small towns have their own small hospital which are IMO a great asset to have. Unfortunately many of them have resorted to rolling closures of their ED's because of lack of staff. But at least they have been pretty good about communicating that ahead of time. After those smaller hospitals we have a bigger one about 35 minutes from here in a town of 50k. And past that we have 2 different 500k + urban areas with multiple hospitals. I can't say much about their ED experience as I fortunately haven't had to use them but wait times can be quite long some times.
IMO our healthcare system is at a tipping point. Actual patient facing care has been barely functioning for decades. IIRC we have one of the worst bed space per 100k population numbers of all the countries with public healthcare. ICU and NICU capacity has been at or near limits for decades, despite what you are hearing in the media right now. The problem is nobody really wants to fix the problem. Politicians simply keep throwing money at the system and saying they've done their part. Hospitals take the money and spend it on almost anything except front line care. Then they hire more management to try and figure out why patient care and staff performance/retention metrics keep falling. Meanwhile healthcare keeps getting worse. ED's are clogged up with people who can't get a family doctor anymore. Wait times for specialists are frankly disgraceful, which leads to bigger problems down the road when conditions that could have been caught early are now caught later and require more treatment.
And as another poster mentioned, there is no accountability on the part of healthcare workers. The amount of "passing off" or doctors deliberately misleading patients so they don't have to deal with them has risen considerably.
So for a system that is one of the biggest sinks of public money in Canada, it really isn't that great at all. There are big issues that need fixed but nobody with a spine or a brain is willing to touch it with a 10' pole since the media will frame them as attacking healthcare and the public will crucify them in the polls.
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Question for Canadians only.
