U. S. Expats Are Revealing The "We're Being Scammed" Realizations They Had After Moving Abroad

[thucythucy]

119. Are you saying your Canadian mother-in-law can call up a doctor here in the US and get seen within a week?

If so, I'm rather astonished. That certainly isn't my experience, or that of pretty much anyone I know.

Just as an example: I have two dear friends, here in the US, both of whom have serious cancer diagnoses. THEY can't get an appointment within one week, hell they often can't get a doctor to CALL them in less than three to five days. They both have health insurance, so that isn't the issue. But if they want to be seen within a week, it most often requires a trip to the ER, which is fraught with its own problems.

Add to this they--and pretty much everyone I know with any sort of serious health issue--need constantly to fight with nameless health insurance "gate keepers" who routinely deny tests and procedures and medications their doctors deem necessary. This includes, in one instance, periodic scans to determine if there's been growth of existing tumors or the appearance of malignancies elsewhere. Her insurer denied the need for such scans--the reason being "we only cover these tests as diagnostic tools, and since you've already been diagnosed we don't think you need to be scanned anymore" or insurance company gibberish to that effect. Her oncologist was eventually able to get that particular denial reversed, but it took almost two months, and in the meantime she had to wonder if her cancer wasn't getting worse, and if so whether delaying additional treatment might not significantly shorten her life.

And I won't even go into mental health access--or the lack thereof--or how Medicare still doesn't cover dental.

Of course Canada isn't a Utopia. No nation is. And yes, indigenous people there have been royally screwed. Then again our own treatment of Native Americans hasn't been all that great--to say the least--as I hope you would agree.

Dependable public transit: Japan yes. Also Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Belgium, Denmark...I'm sure there are more but these are places I can attest to personally. Are there countries with equivalent or worse public transit than the USA? Yes. Of course. But there are enough countries that do so much better than we do that, here too, to claim the USA "is #1" is ludicrous. Considering too how we often claim to be the richest country in the world, you would think we could manage to build and maintain a decent transit system that isn't entirely dependent on cars.