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Comment by jasonlotito | Hacker News Reader

What does this have to do with my experience with Canada's health care system? I'm merely stating the facts of what my family had to go through and experienced with Canada's lack of mental health care support for my children, and the results.

Edit: Because you decided to edit your comment. Here are some other numbers for you.

-14 days vs 2+ years: US wait time vs Canada wait time to get help for my autistic son. We had help before we arrived in the US. We had no help for autism while up in Canada.

$0/yr vs. $36,000/yr: US cost vs Canada cost for autism therapy. The $36k Canadian cost was the soonest we could get it, which was still a wait time of more than a year after the appointment (which had an additional wait time).

Canada did have more doctors complaining that we were trying to do to much for our children though. It has that going for it.

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Im sorry to hear that you had bad experiences in Canada. However your personal story is effectively one data point and not necessarily representative of a good comparison between healthcare systems. This analysis is a pretty good overall analysis of the quality, efficacy and safety of different healthcare systems. That’s not to say that just because the US is worse overall that it doesn’t perform better in a subset of medicine, in your case, mental health. But no matter what your own personal situation, you have effectively moved from a bad system to a worse system (even though it has been good for your family personally).

The original posts point which you quoted is that the US health system is Fd and everyone knows it. The analysis presented here supports that. The US spends a lot more per capita on healthcare with worse outcomes and less people having access to healthcare. I’m very glad your move has has worked out for you.

(UK Medical Student)

Keep in mind many of the statistics you posted - healthy lives, health equity, access to care, etc. are extremely important on a population health level (says the Epidemiologist...) but not necessarily for any particular individual, especially one with the money to spend.

America's rarely been a bad place to be for one with money to spend.

Absolutely!

If you have good insurance, I can't imagine the US not being top of the heap.

I had an injury that resulted in a spinal fusion and other surgery at 25. Total out of pocket cost for about $250k of care and full recovery was about $500. That included second opinion visits to top doctors in Boston & NYC.

If you're on limited network Obamacare with high deductibles and HMO bullshit, good luck.

There are no individual PPO plans for my area (Austin, Texas), so I was stuck with HMO for 2016. This applies to about 330,000 people in Texas who had their individual PPO plans cancelled. So as far as I can tell, it is actually impossible to get "good insurance" (a PPO plan) here, as an individual.