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Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this site has a bit of a bias when it comes to the USA. Most devs are highly compensated in the USA and can afford whatever.

Being poor or sick sucks here.

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Most of Canada is pretty poor now.

From the Economist: https://archive.is/UdixF/ec46ebf7fe812cd5e9432f45f68bd142e6c...

Their housing is more expensive than the US, but taxes are higher and wages are lower.

If Canada’s provinces were states, the populated ones would be poorer than the poorest US states, along with higher taxes and expensive housing.

https://brilliantmaps.com/us-vs-canada-gdp-per-capita/

British Columbia is now poorer than Idaho, again, while being much more expensive. Ontario and Quebec and Canada as a whole are now poorer than West Virginia.

You say "now" as though it's ever not been the case. These comparisons do a poor job of taking into account cost-of-living and quality-of-life; it's simply not the case that you're better off in Montgomery than Toronto.

The median wages for Toronto and Montgomery are actually quite similar:

Toronto: $84k CAD ($58k USD)

Montgomery: $55k

The person living in Montgomery can easily afford a house and a middle-class life. Can the person in Toronto?

Would I rather live in Toronto personally? Yes. But on a median salary, no way.

https://www.city-data.com/income/income-Montgomery-Alabama.h...

https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/9877-City-...

> The person living in Montgomery can easily afford a house and a middle-class life. Can the person in Toronto?

Of course not. But a person living in New York City - making the much higher median household income of 75K USD - also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there. And yet across almost every metric New York is considered a better place to live with higher quality of life than Alabama.

> also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there.

So can you compare cost of living between NYC and Toronto and does the difference in median account for COL difference ?

Would be interesting to hear some first hand experiences from people who lived in both or similarly comparable US/Canadian cities. I was under the impression that Chinese investment in Canadian real estate really destroyed the housign market. I feel like the growing popularity of investing in residential real estate is a global phenomena but some markets are more exposed to some effects than others so it's possible to get some intuition on what impacts it.

Yeah, you're probably - in most regards, depending on various things - better off living in NYC than Toronto (having lived in both). But that's at least a conversation worth having, a comparison worth making. Comparing Canada to the poorest places in America like the person I was replying to was solely on the basis of average wealth only makes sense if you've never been within spitting distance of either.

I have lived in both. It's easier to afford a Canadian home, despite their price, especially in Montreal but even in Toronto, compared to NYC or SF, for the median person. The median household income in NYC is ~80k, vs ~95k in Toronto.

Canada is much much more geographicly concentrated than the US.

Toronto is definitely cheaper than NYC. However Toronto represents a WAYYYY higher percentage of Canadians than NY does.

Rough numbers.

GTA population ~7 million

NYC population ~8.5 million

By representation GTA represents 10x the amount of the country that NYC does.

Major cities being unaffordable in Canada pretty much means Canada is unaffordable.

The same case is not true in the US

If you're going to use the GTA @ 7M (6.2 according to wikipedia[0]) you should perhaps use Metro NYC @ 23.5M[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

That's a fair correction, but it is still approx 3x the proportion of the population.

Edit: actually I take that back the metropolitan NY area seems to encompass a much larger area than the GTA and goes across multiple states.

Sure, but on the other hand that's just as true for income in the US, the disparity in average income between major cities and the rest of the US is even sharper than it is in Canada.

The social services are better in Canada though. The big downside is the lack of quickly available treatment for serious-but-not-life-threatening illness.

> The big downside is the lack of quickly available treatment for serious-but-not-life-threatening illness.

Which often happens in the US as well. I recall having to wait 3 months to get in to see a gastroenterologist about 10 years ago. People living in rural areas of the US often face this so it's not like it's a problem exclusive to Canada or other countries with universal healthcare.

It doesn’t help if you can’t afford a house. If you just look at a simple crude statistic like gdp per capital US is 83% higher. You can’t make stuff appear out of thin air, there’s less resources to go around and people are objectively worse off

It actually does help, in fact it helps MORE if you cant afford a house, or are homeless, to have a strong social net. Not arguing that the US isn't richer or can offer more financial resources to its citizens.

> Being poor or sick sucks here.

Can't say for the rest of Canada, but the healthcare is deplorable in Québec.

Don't worry it gets worse if you come to Ontario.

There is not and never has been any place on Earth where being poor and sick doesn't suck.

But at least in the US, if you can afford the treatment, you can get it.

But at least in first world countries, unlike the US, you WILL get treatment. Even if you are poor, like 95% of the US population.

No that's the thing, you can't get the treatment if it doesn't exist.

For the years that i was living in Ontario there were only 3 MRI machines across the entire province. The waiting period for that diagnostic MRI ranged from anywhere between 10 and 24 months. If doctors were even convinced you were worth getting it.

You could die from something before you could even end up getting properly diagnosed with it.

You might not have competent enough doctors in some countries for specialist treatment if you need it. A popular Canadian Youtuber who lives in Japan (which generally has great medical care) decided to relocate to the United States during the time they were undergoing their particular cancer treatment a couple of years ago. Japanese yakuza bosses pretty famously obtained their illegal organ transplants at UCLA Medical instead of in Japan...

The US's system is certainly flawed but it guarantees that you can obtain the best care possible if you can afford it. That's much better than not being able to get the care even if you can afford it.

Is that not two different tradeoffs? One is first come first serve and the other is purely if you have the resources at the time? The only people I see that praise the "guarantee if you can afford it", are indeed, the ones that can afford it.

Soviet bread lines were first come first serve too and I don't know any former Soviet state residents gushing about how great those times were. Those 3 MRI machines that I mentioned had to service 1/3 of the population of Canada at the time -- about 10 million people.

Saying "oh that's just first come first serve" is totally missing the fact that the service level can be woefully inadequate.

What's really crazy is that I live in a small city of about 100k people and there are about a dozen hospitals that I can choose from, first-class trauma centers, multiple renowned research centers (affiliated with three different universities). None of that is counting all of the urgent care and other facilities in the area. I have an order of magnitude more options for treatment than I did when living in New York City...

The only way I could open myself up to more/better care options would be to move to Texas.

Well the US spends 17% of GDP on health care and Canada only spends 12% while life expectancy in the US is at least 2 years less.

You get superb care for the rich and mediocre care for the average guy and very little for the rest.

Life expectancy is, perhaps counterintuitively, not highly connected to health care. The major factors contributing to the gap between US and Canadian life expectancy are car accidents, homicides, and cardiovascular disease, and CVD differs wildly depending where you are in the country; there are states that lead the G7 in CVD outcomes, and others (like Mississippi and Alabama) that look like developing-world countries.

None of this is to defend the US system in particular, which wildly overspends on the outcomes it achieves. But generally, when it comes to managing chronic and acute health conditions, those outcomes are very good.

If only there was a way to change and influence the use of public funds...

Except that comprehensive studies, in contrast to anecdotes, show that people in countries with public health care in fact DO get good treatment generally. So while maybe in rare circumstances you could have to wait too long, the vast majority of the time your life is not put at risk by a little wait.

> For the years that i was living in Ontario there were only 3 MRI machines across the entire province.

Jesus. I've got more MRI machines than that within walking distance of my house.

It does seem to have improved significantly, as in 2020 Ontario had 124 (which made it the best provisioned province at the time). When were you there?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/821422/number-of-mri-uni...

Early 2000s. When I left in 2003 there were 5 and then they had a few years where they added 20-25 per year.

CT scans were bad too. Everyone I knew just drove to New York to get diagnostic scan and dental work done at the time.

But even then: Ontario has 15 million people and 124 machines? NYC has 8 million residents and 470 machines.

Do those machines operate 24/7? I'm Canadian and get regular (publicly funded) MRIs as part of my healthcare needs and they always happen on time, and close to home. Zero issues. Sometimes you get appointments at weird hours but that's because they run them constantly.

We could definitely use more and our healthcare system could definitely use serious improvements, but the way it's talked about amongst Americans often seems a little divorced from reality.

There are many places where it sucks much, much less.

I'll take Iceland or another Nordic social democracy for evidence that you're wrong there.

Possibly it does have that bias (which is to be expected considering its origins and target audience), but I've generally found a good faith and generous reception to pro-EU arguments (in counter to pro-USA comments) here as well.

What you say is true. But do you have insight on how badly the Canadian poor have it relative to the American poor?

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