This is a reposting of a comment that I made in a diary long passed. It's in response to a commenter that essentially called me a traitor to the cause for wanting to leave the U.S. It may not say anything new and I'm certainly not in as bad a shape as the likes of nyceve, but it has to be said.
First of all, I've been smacked over the head repeatedly with the canard that 'health care in Canada has long waits!' The wait for health care under the plan I have now is dangerously long. It takes me six months plus to see a specialist (save playing phone tag to get perscriptions) and just as long to get colonoscopies. I can't see how the wait in Canada is going to be any worse. Round here, we ALREADY have rationing.
No amount of luxury cutting will allow me to afford a single payer policy, unemployed (or minimally employed) with ulcerative colitis. With people being denied policies for suspicious moles, guaranteed that unless I get under a group plan, nobody will ever be offering me health insurance. And fewer and fewer companies are going to be offering any sort of health plan to anyone that isn't management.
Plus, it's extraordinarily ignorant to argue that cutting my $50 a month in broadband access charges is going to allow me to suddenly afford a $25,000 hospital copay. Even WITH insurance, I get diagnosed with colon cancer -- a high risk with my disease -- I'm dead. One way or the other.
At least in Canada or Switzerland, I will have none of these worries. I'll gladly pay half my income in taxes for sake of NEVER having to worry about access to lifesaving treatment. Period. That will forever be a worry here, because I'm not management, not an executive, and not a politician. I'm just a scientist,and a very young scientist (still a graduate student) at that. A breed that's increasingly coming under fire in this country, too, as many other diaries have indicated.
I really want to stay and fight. But I'll say it again: I'd rather be a live activist in Canada then a dead martyr -- for no cause at all but adding some number to a statistics page which changes NOTHING -- in this country.