TigerBill's DrumBeat Community Forums for Free Expert Advice on Drums and Percussion.

You're going to love my latest brush with our Nova Scotian Canadain health system. I went down seriously with walking pneumonia back five weeks ago. Passed out on the floor, the works. My wife got me into her car, hauled me down to a walk in clinic in the South end of Halifax where within 15 minutes they had nailed down the problem, prescribed me an antibiotic which cost me 18 bucks which in two weeks killed the bug and got me on my feet and drumming again. On top of which they spotted a nasty little rash type thing on my back over my left shoulder blade, made me an appointment with my own G.P. immediately at his clinic which I went to pronto. When I got there I was seen within 15 minutes by not only my G.P. but also two cancer specialists, a heart specialist and a dietician. They grilled me through both prostate and colon cancer tests, gave my back rash a clean bill of health after tests and sent me home to recouperate from the whole thing after taking six phails of blood for tests. Cost me nothing, and the reports came back healthy "but needed to build back up the strength for drumming" within 24 hours. That's how our system works here boys and girls. I'm 72 this year and thanks to our system I am good to go and do what I do best. No long waits, all the right specialists were on me like spiders on a fly and I have four call backs to check me over in the next two months. Here they prize their performing artists and what they do. They are on us so fast that you don't even have time to turn around. Not only that, they treat you like a Human Being not some body to be processed. They all knew my name, called me by my first name, shook my hand and asked me how my wife was by name. They also know I teach kids and while they were running all over me they were asking how my kids were doing in drumming with me. They also checked the old surgeries from a few years ago with x-rays and scans and all the doctors and also the two nurses who saw me dropped by as I was leaving to go home and asked me to never be a stranger again at the clinic.
Give me a break, our system here in Nova Scotia works really well, it's worth every penny of the tax base it uses and there are more healthy people walking around here who would be on the scrap heap without it than you can shake a stick at. If we didn't have our system in place I would have paid close to $3,000.00 just for all the work they did on me last week. I paid exactly $18.00 for my meds and that was that.
Those that roll through to the States to get work done are either going for a certain procedure or have piles of money and in the end our system will in most cases transfer the money to U.S. private procedure clinics etc anyway. Hut for the normal Canadian the system more than fills any gaps and does a pretty thorough job. As Drums up syas it does not discriminate as far as social staus is concerned and as I said, there are many average Canadians living productive lives and conributing to the tax base because of our Health system across the country which does vary from Province to Province because as is mentioned above, each Province runs its own health system as it best suits the economic climate of the Province. And as is also mentioned above, in most cases those south of our border really have not the faintest idea of how Canada really runs anyway. They read a few biased reports and editorials about our system and run with those opinions. The fact is, no matter what the politics, our system is based on equal treatment for all Canadians across the board. It has been that way since the early 6ty0s and in some Provinces before that. We have had plenty of time to fine tune the Public Health system and also we do not have middle-man/woman hands in the form of politicians dipping their hands into the Public health system till. It's set up right!

Edited by roger strange (Sun Feb 26 2012 04:27 PM)