A little story about health care

As a dual citizen, (and my husband and I have each lived abroad in a third country--so, experience with 4 countries' health care systems between the 2 of us) I am often asked to compare our health care system in Manitoba with US health care.  This is an impossibility; it's like comparing anchovies with oranges.  If someone asked you to do this, you'd say, HUH?  Why?

In the US, health care is different in every state. Even more complicated, it varies enormously from one city or region to another.  (Health care in Northern Virginia, near DC, as compared to, say, the stats from Appalachian Virginia)  Health care in upstate New York or Durham, North Carolina was vastly different than when I lived in Kentucky...it varies so much in the US from one place to another and is so uneven that if you've lived in a variety of places, you know these generalizations are useless.

The same can be said about Canada--although health care is "free" here, it's actually paid for by our taxes, and there are fees on top of "free" that vary from province to province.  It's also different in each province, and again different, when comparing regions: a city, for instance, as compared to a rural area.

Just a couple days after I got diagnosed with pneumonia, one of my kids woke up in the middle of the night with something that looked a lot like mumps.  (and yes, we are fully vaccinated at our house.)

Here's my most recent CBC-Manitoba opinion piece about our experience, which ran on Saturday:
How would Manitoba handle an epidemic?