Canadian health care comment

There's been a lot of nonsense flying around about Canadian health care, so I've decided to throw my 2 cents in, because I know actual facts about the Canadian system, since one of my parents is from Canada.

My grand-dad was Canadian. He was well into middle age when Canada instituted its single-payer system in the province where he lived.

Grandpa died of cancer when I was in high school. While he was still able to stay at his home, he had a nurse making house calls for him 2 or 3 times weekly. Understand, Grandpa and Grandma lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of a town of 1,500 souls -- Alice Munro and Robertson Davies country, about an hour from the nearest full-service hospital. He spent his last weeks in a hospital room, pretty well doped up because the cancer had taken over both his back and his lungs; he was in pain from both breathing and lying down.

But my point, and I do have one, is that cost was never a consideration in any of the conversations the family had about his care. The nurse and her 2-hour round-trip to care for him, the diagnostic imaging and treatments before we switched to palliative care, the final weeks in the hospital, all free. The family upheaval around his end-of-life care did not include stress about where the money to pay for it would come from. It's hard to express how much of a difference that makes, though it seems to me that it should be obvious.

Grandma spent her last few years in an assisted-living facility. It wasn't free, but it cost spectacularly less than American facilities generally cost. She saw her doctor regularly, and, again, we never had to factor in the cost of her pills or treatments or hearing aids when we looked at her budget for the facility.

Anecdotally, I've never heard from any of my Canadian relatives that they had to wait in line for some life-saving treatment. It may take a while to get a check-up, but that doesn't differ from my own experience here in the States. In comparison, I need to see a dermatologist about a funny-looking mole, and was told that I probably couldn't be seen for 4 or 5 months, even though I have a family history of melanoma.

If I recall correctly, the Canadian system doesn't cover dental, though you can opt for private dental insurance if you want. So my Canadian relatives tend to have teeth that are more, shall we say, English-looking than mine. But this is because they are tight-fisted with their money, not because their health insurance system is wanting. Also, most of the guys played hockey in their youth, and those of my parent's generation didn't use helmets or mouthguards.

And Grandpa smoked a pipe for decades. His teeth were worn down where he held the pipe in his mouth. I don't know when he ever saw a dentist, though I know he had a small bridge that he'd use pretty much only when he was eating. One day we were sitting at the kitchen table playing cards and eating jellybeans. Suddenly, he pulled a jellybean out of his mouth, with one of his teeth still attached to it. We all of us thought it was hilarious. Who breaks their tooth on something as soft as a jellybean?