I've literally never heard anyone in America discuss Canada's unemployment numbers in any context whatsoever. I think your premise may be off.
Canada is also pretty tiny (smaller than California; much smaller GDP than California) so I'm not sure why we would care.
Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site. It leads to nationalistic flamewars, which we seriously don't want here.
> On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States, by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard deviations in Germany.[1]
Your claims relies on the assumption that unemployment in Canada is more tolerable than unemployment in the US. Yet large-scale surveys do not reflect that for the average jobseeker.
Therefore we can conclude that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment. The same also holds true for the major Western European economies surveyed.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408...
Your data is not relevant to the hypothesis. The surveys were conducted in different time-frames (Canada: 2009-2014, USA 2005-2010), which I shouldn't need to tell anyone why that dataset is not useful for rigorous comparison, but I will anyway: one surveys people who were just recently hit by a recession and tracks them throughout the economy's recovery; while the other surveys people who recently experienced massive economic growth (exuberance) and tracks them throughout their economy crashing. Both, Canda's and the USA's, economies were intertwined during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and this should be accounted for -- but it isn't.
Furthermore, the data DOES hold up to the GP's assertion: that as the unemployment rate goes up, the gap in life satisfaction between employed and unemployed approaches zero (chart 2). That is, 20% nationwide unemployment, unemployed and employed Canadians have the same life satisfaction (chart 1).
Lastly, this is social sciences. We cannot conclude anything from the data without experimentation. At best, this data is observational reason to pursue deeper inquiry, at worst it's idealogical fodder to drive other people's agends by lying with statistics. Everyone does it. Statistics don't really mean anything on their own, and lay-people give them too much weight!
>1). There is a relationship in your data
>2). There isn't a relationship in your data
From there, you can then setup further experiments to better understand why there is or isn't a relationship -- and perhaps find the opposite is true!
It's the same reason you don't assume a theory is "true;" you don't conclude "that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment" (GGP), because that's bad science!
What the GGP did is create an inference -- one based on misread data and faulty assumptions about scientific methods -- and expressed it as de facto. Now, in order for his inference to have weight, he must either support it with further evidence (DIY meta-analysis) or carry out some other type of experiment to test said inference.
Here's a very brief primer: https://socialresearchmethods.net/kb/concval.php
Huge surveys long showed a correlation between smokers and increased incidence of cancer. But it took decades of research to rule out confounding factors. For example, it may have been the case that industrial work was causing the cancer and industrial workers just happened to be more likely to be smokers.
There is one tool that really nails causation fairly quickly which is a double blind controlled experiment. But usually in social science it's very hard to or even immoral to conduct such experiments.
For example, assigning babies at random to be smokers or not for some period would be pretty hard to carry out and certainly be immoral if you thought the smoking may lead to cancer.
They succeeded in corrupting the political process though. I don't think you should need 100% scientific certainty to begin regulatory action. Maybe 80% or 90% of the way is good enough. The industry succeeded in requiring 150% certainty before a public health response could begin.
It's standard for all data, but must be enforced more strictly in social sciences where controlling for all variables (let alone knowing what they all are!) is impossible, and your correlations are more likely to be pure chance.
See: reproducibility crisis in social sciences
Me expressing my opinion, but I don't like either. So I try to steer away from expressing "my opinion," and sticking to only things that have a high probability of being true, which in this case, is the GGGP using an imperfect study incorrectly.
The parent argues that Americans disproportionately boast about their unemployment figures compared to Canadians despite US unemployment carrying an exponentially greater risk of causing financial ruin due to medical expenses.
You dismissed his comment outright by citing that self-reported stress levels of unemployed Canadians and Americans are about the same, although this is at best tangentially related.
If so, all it says is that unemployment sucks and fails to really compare across borders. I've seen some stuff that indicates American parents are some of the most stressed out and dissatisfied parents on the planet due to our lack of family-friendly policies, including but not limited to our sucky healthcare policies.
You can get health insurance without having a job. It's expensive, but it's not like it's cheap through employers. Just cheaper.
Health care - at least, treatment for life-threatening emergencies - is a right protected by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in the US.
It turns out a few turn-your-head-and-coughs in your 30s is a way better deal than waiting for it to become a trip to the ER in your 50s.
The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world, which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated.
On the other hand, it's basically dismissive of a very real problem here. I read a lot about homelessness. I've seen far too many people indicate they are homeless in part because they have cancer and it's ruining them financially.
America is hardly some utopia where we take wonderful care of all our people, regardless of ability to pay.
This way, you die with treatment and our system does not seem cruel. Even advanced, expensive chemotherapy is paid for, sometimes exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Affordable Care Act provides subsidies for health insurance based on income, not assets. If you're diagnosed with cancer and lose your job (because chemo is tough), and have assets, pay the Cobra until next sign up period. Sell all assets and invest to make about $20-$30k a year. Your premiums will be low and you'll have access to quality care. Move near large academic institutions because they do medicaid / bad insurance care. This way you minimally touch assets.
Rich people hate the Affordable Care Act because they don't get subsidies on premiums, which are about $3500 / month for a family now, and they have to pay 4.8% Medicare tax on all income over $250k . So, in essence, someone that makes $1m a year pays $78k/year in health care costs.
Lastly, I take care of a Pizza Hut delivery person who gets his insurance through the Affordable Care Act and only pays $40 / month for it, because of the subsidies.
Just for clarity's sake:
Medicare is a health insurance program for all citizens of U.S. whereas Medicaid is health coverage for low income group and people with disabilities.
Medicare is federal-supported program and Medicaid is a joint program by the state and the federal government. As such the eligibility and coverage for Medicaid vary from state to state.
https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-medicar...
The US isn’t bad in that respect, but according to Wikipedia, this statement isn’t even true for the subset of countries on their list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality...
It is attributable almost entirely to more aggressive (and expensive) diagnostics combined with many new cancer therapies being available in the US years before they trickle down to the rest of the world.
No it doesn't.
But even if it was true (and it isn't) you should also specify which type of cancer.
No country gets every type of cancer better than any other.
For example if we consider stomach cancer, South Korea is on top with 57.90% survival rate, USA is 30 points lower at 29.10%
> which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated
It wouldn't also be possible if rich people couldn't get the same treatments other countries have developed by traveling abroad or having them for cheap in Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela.
But to put it in another way: take breast cancer, where USA leads the charts with 88.87% survival rate.
According to the sources "About 1 in 8 U.S. women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime."
In Italy, where I come from, we measure breast cancer as patients over 100,000 women, not in %.
"Breast cancer is the leading tumor among women in Italy ... The incidence per age group was estimated to exceed 100 new cases every 100,000 women ≥ 40 years of age"
100 over 100,000 is one in a thousands or 0,1%, which is 120 times better than U.S. 12%.
It means that every 120 women that develop breast cancer in USA there is only one Italian woman in the same condition.
That's what really an universal health care system make possible: to not develop the diseases.
Cancer incidence rates are primarily the product of genetics and environment, which is why it varies across countries. It has little to do with access to healthcare. Stanford hospital has given state-of-the-art treatment for both liver and stomach cancer for free to poor members of my family.
I'm sorry, but that's not how it works.
For example only 1 in 4 breast cancers are attributed globally to risk factors (i.e genetics or environment)? [1]
Since you're bringing it up, I know a things or two about cancer, my father worked in health care, in pulmonary oncology, my mother worked in health care too, in infective diseases, most of my family is tied to Italian public health care, my aunts and uncles worked for it, our family best friends worked there, one of their children and one of my best friends is now a geneticist and is researching rare disease (some types of cancers among the others).
If it was simply about environment and genetics, looking at the numbers, one would assume that in Africa or India they have a very resilient genetic pool and the best environment in the World and in USA they've got some serious problem [2] [3].
Of course that's not the entire story, in those places people don't develop cancer because they die for many other (curable) diseases before cancer gets them.
So what makes survival rates so high in the US?
Well, this Forbes article [4] explains it quite well: overtreating.
But at what price? (not talking about raw monetary value here)
Cancer insurgence is tightly related to aging [5], I've brought up the example of Italy because it's the second oldest population in the World on average after Japan.
And we know that the best cure for cancer is (still) avoiding it.
We have a system here that tries to prevent cancer: women are called in for regular check ups for a number of diseases (including breast cancer), men are checked regularly for prostatic cancer when they are 40 or older and its for free.
Companies, by law, have to send their employees to regular check ups every five years.
I have high blood pressure, I have to attend mandatory check ups every year, because I am more at risk than the others.
It's all paid by the Company.
Would you prefer to develop breast cancer and have a 90% chance of survival or not develop it at all?
Breast cancer is by far the most common type of cancer for women [6] and it has high levels of survival rates in all the western World [7].
What's particularly controversial about the way US counts average survival rates is that they also count breast cancer in situ, which is not a try cancer, but it's used to inflate breast cancer statistics [8]
One statistics is particularly interesting, despite the fact that since the 90s sales of cigarettes per adult per day dropped dramatically and are among the lowest in the west [9] the share of cancer deaths attributed to tobacco is still pretty (alarmingly) high [10].
What's really important in cancer prevention and cure is that globally the chances of going back to an average life expectancy is rising, not only the survival rate after 5 years. In Italy 25% of cancer patients can expect to go back to a normal life, I haven't found the numbers relative to USA.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-cancer-deaths-at...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates?tab=ma...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/06/13/why-the-us-has...
[5] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...
[6] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...
[7] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/five-year-survival-rates-...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancer_mortality_rates...
[9] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sales-of-cigarettes-per-a...
[10] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-cancer-deaths-at...
You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals - we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people. I invite you to try surviving very long as a diabetic when the only treatment option is to go to A&E when you are literally dying.
[1] https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...
I'm not offering an opinion here. I just think the distinction between health care and insurance is important.
The original post I was responding to implies to some that you need a job to receive treatment. It also conversely implies that having a job means you can get treatment. I've actually talked to people outside the US who think that because of how our discussions are often worded.
> You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals
I'm sorry. I often think of things to add to my post right after submitting. I was editing it before I saw your response.
> we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people.
I agree, which is why I specified that the right only extends to life-threatening emergencies.
If you believe that, you've bilged a test of basic humanity. If you don't, perhaps re-think what drives your well-actuallies in the future?
[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elderly-couple-found-dead-in-ap...
Stop projecting opinions that are not mine onto my post. I believe the health care and insurance industries in the US is broken and does not adequately serve a huge portion of citizens with low incomes. I have never suggested the current system is okay.
If your opinion is reliant on misinformation, you should reevaluate it. Otherwise, you should not be concerned with someone like me "splitting hairs".
My intention is not to say "you're just broke, you're not dead". Quite the opposite. My intention is to say that health care access is not limited by whether you have a job - it's whether you have money. Plenty of people have money but no job and even more have jobs but no money.
That's hilarious.
I mean, you are correct that employers bundle employees together. But without massive government intervention during and after WWII, the industry would have been wildly different, and the way the trend began was highly historically contingent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942
Econ 101 is insufficient for understanding the world.
It is very useful to look at other countries - we have lots of natural experiments in health care markets. If bundling were determinative of market structure, you'd see the same pattern elsewhere.
"Emotionally tolerable" is a very different thing from "financially risky". Indeed, people should be willing to tolerate temporary dissatisfaction to achieve a better long term outcome in ways that they are not willing to tolerate complete financial ruin and the potential loss of major assets that will decrease their long term outcomes.
[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536...
You are also citing a study that looks at the financial stress levels of employed mental health professionals and then trying to use that to reason about the economic choices made by unemployed people.
This is not how you use data responsibly. You can't just use a 30% correlation in an unrelated dataset to justify conflating two different measures without actually doing statistical analysis to show that that there is reason to believe that that correlation not only exists in a different population, but also isn't washed out by an a other factors.
I don't think that's actually true, I think it's a political talking point that we are all hit over the head with repeatedly. A key progressive talking point is that the issue of so-called "prosperity" is not as simple as "everyone has a job". This is where the issue of people having multiple jobs, minimum wage, benefits, unions, etc. all come into play but that all requires more cognitive overhead, something that is in scarce supply with a nation steeped in distraction.
It's a staged premise - which was entirely unsupported - to launch into the America Bad talking point. If you don't use a primer to launch into that, it looks particularly biased on a forum. So what you do instead, is you set up something ugly (those boasting Americans!) that can never be backed up, and that provides your on-ramp.
This is a comedy routine here on HN at this point.
Consider that the Americans boasting premise was the whole foundation to the parent comment and the parent made zero effort to back it up (it'd be impossible to support, the US is far too large, insular, and diverse for it to be likely true). The same country that, yes, largely doesn't know where Iran is at on a map, pays deep attention to Canadian economic statistics.
As someone who lives in the US, I’ve never heard anyone even mention Canada’s unemployment rate.
It’s just not on the radar.
Pre-2000, 65% of adults 18+ were in the workforce; Today that sits at shy of 60%. You'd expect the cycle of liquidity crisis driven by reserveless lending would result in a stable graph over long periods of time, instead over an elongated period of time, it's pointing downard.
The problem with this is you leave a lot of people on the sidelines\wayside, and it takes years of working, of gaining experience, even doing something like janitorial work, to be considered competent.
Walmart has a drug rehab program today they run at many of their stores; they drug test 100 applicants, 99 fail the drug test. They have no other way of finding people to staff basic positions.
The entire concept and point of minimum wage was to ensure people wouldn't fall into this kind of disarray and businesses that complain about minimum wage hikes are parasites that have to literally eat people alive to survive, except today they hire PR Firms to cover it up. This is not the way to run a society. A lot of the reason our government allows this to go on has to do with controversial tech firms like Uber being funded by foreign entiteis with questionable morals such as the Saudi Oil fund, the US Government allowing china to buy 100bn+ in bonds every year, and other such "arrangements". We had 2 presidential candidates last election the Russians government admitted to compromising.
Congress has sold certain segments of people up the river and genuinely doesn't know how to get them out.
If you look at the growth rate in US Census data and private studies of men over 45 never married, no chilren, and look at the trend and how that has been correlated with a declining fertility rate that's starting to rival the USSR's collapse.
We haven't even begun to recover from 2000, and there's one heck of a powder keg forming.
And none of those people who make up that powder keg care about whether or not our health system is superior or inferior to canada's.
Sorry for being the "cite please" guy, but where on Earth did you find this? It's not in your link.
Understand this is a company that advertised converting their employee's to all part-time in 2008 to save on health insurance and then lost their proverbial behinds when they had to hire 8x as many hands whom stole 100x as much merchandise. Some stores had 7 figure shrink numbers. They're under indictment under FCPA by the SEC right now.
If you want some REALLY fun numbers, go look at BLS OES Job wage data for number of warehouse supervisors vs number of warehouse workers. More supervisors than workers. Walk into a warehouse sometime and look around, lots of people who can't speak english.
Not hard to find statistics on how these kinds of outfits work.
I grew tremendously as a person working jobs I didn't enjoy. I only work on what I want to now, and I couldn't imagine I'd be very satisfied with my life I didn't navigate to this position through hard work.
EDIT: to clarify - it's not that I look down on any jobs. Trash pickup is very much needed profession. What I'm saying is: Let's say person wins a lottery and suddenly has all the money they need for the rest of their lives. I can imagine that many software developers will still continue to program, writers or musicians would continue writing novels or songs, but I'm pretty sure noone would voluntarily continue their trash pickup work.
People tend to frame things selectively in response to the audience in question. People in vulnerable positions are usually aware of it and acting to protect themselves.
Do they love it like I love programming? Maybe; maybe not, but it seems possible.
I have experiences with many jobs that were not enjoyable. By "not enjoyable", I don't only mean they were dull office jobs. I had a lot of jobs in my early twenties, often through temp agencies but not always: working in warehouses, working as a manual laborer in large institutional buildings (moving furniture etc), two different jobs working on factory assembly lines, working in old office buildings to pull network cable through ceilings and floors, working on receiving docks, etc. Well over ten or fifteen jobs, as they tended to last for a summer, or a few months or weeks. As someone with computer skills and ultimately a pretty promising career ahead of me, I always had the sense in these temp jobs that they were just that, "temporary". However, most everyone I worked with in these roles were not there as temps, they were the people for whom life had worked out such that these kinds of jobs were close to the best they were going to get. There is no amount of "hard work" that someone in these roles can apply to move to a new station in life, there are too many strikes against them: educational, cognitive/developmental, health-wise, criminal backgrounds, etc. that make it extremely unlikely they would ever have much better of a station in life. And like me, all of these people were entirely aware of this element of who they were; they were the "lifers".
One of the worst jobs I had which I could only handle for about two weeks was working in a factory that manufactured rolls of ink ribbon for line printers and typewriters. My job was to be handed a large metal bar called the "spindle" onto which I would pull out 30 or so rolls, stick all the rolls onto the spindle with spacers in between them, then hand them off to this other woman who had whatever minor skill was required to put this spindle into the machine that would roll the ink ribbon onto them. You do this in a dark and smelly factory for 8 hours a day. This job was for me, a valuable experience, as I can look back on it with all the perspective offered by doing that kind of job. But for all the other folks working in that place including the woman who I handed the spindle off towards, that was it for them. They were all at most high school grad or less, they were people for whom there were no opportunities. The job paid minimum wage. They were "lifers". These people are counted as part of "the employed". But they live paycheck to paycheck with minimal benefits or health care, in a dangerous and unhealthy environment, low life expectancy, poor nutrition, all of it. I don't consider low employment numbers to be very interesting when one notes how miserable life is for so many of the "employed".
The idea isn't that you don't need a job, the idea is that you are less dependent on finding a job right away so that you can find a good fit between your skills and your goals and your job. This not only will lead to a better life for you, but more overall economic productivity.
"Any job" doesn't help people find stable work as well as training and a safety net do. SOME jobs provide this, but forcing people into jobs that don't is counterproductive. This is a common misunderstanding people have.
That seems to be the definition of an acceptable job.
To me a good job is one which you wouldn't mind doing every day for the rest of your life. The occupation needs to actually be desirable in the long run, and a decent paycheck does not fit the bill.
If yes: imagine a world where more people are willing to do other jobs more social because money becomes less relevant.
About 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 for an unexpected expense, and most wouldn't even be able to borrow any money.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...
The danger of being purely quantitatively driven by these historically useful metrics is that there is an absolute focus on keeping the numbers at the right level or moving in the right direction while simultaneously doing things that undercut the value of those metrics. In the previous century, falling unemployment numbers used to indicate that factory workers were returning to work at their old wage and benefits or better that new jobs were being created. However, today it often means that the factory worker who lost their job is now an Uber driver for a fraction of the pay. You used to see stories like 'factory X is bringing back Y thousand good paying jobs as it (re)opens a production line' now the story is 'unemployment is below 4%... shut up and like it'
[1] If all else isn't equal, whether comparing economy A to economy B or a previous version of itself, you are right it isn't a meaningful metric at all.
It does not count those taking time off.
That would be the UNDERemployment rate.
But yes, the standard unemployment rate that’s talked about does not account for a lower participation rate, people who could be working or looking for a job but aren’t.
Clinton found a way to exclude all those pesky minorities. He renamed them from "minority" to "discouraged" workers and dropped them off the books! Pig ...
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/employment-rate, https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate
In Canada, you'd go to the doctor and then continue you on your way.
In the USA, with the situation you described above, you would now be homeless. And in debt.
So yes, they're both stressful. But one is worse.
I'd be fucked. I have no msp coverage currently and haven't for a couple years. I can't actually go to a doctor right now unless I get hurt at work and wcb covers it.
You guys believe a lot of bullshit fairy tales about things up here honestly.
This is an issue with the government, not the economy or medical system. They literally make cheap treatment illegal.
PS: For anyone in this situation, search online for FISH MOX or FISH PEN. Amoxicillin and Penicillin respectively. Aquarium stores usually carry them. Saved my life a few times! Sadly, no longer on Amazon.
Edit: I should have specifically said that I'm talking about expensive prescription drugs and required ancillary care that is not paid for by the province. Also, each province is different. Ex: cancertaintyforall.ca
The Canadian healthcare system doesn’t even have the concept of “pre-existing condition”. That term is deeply flawed and was constructed by the healthcare insurance system in the USA.
The term used in Canada is “medical history”.
I’m at an age where I’m watching my friends in Canada deal with family suffering from long term illnesses and ultimately, death.
They all deal with anguish, grief, heartbreak, and in some cases depression.
But none of them are dealing with medical bills.
Neither does the US since the passage of ACA in 2010:
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/
My experience is anecdotal from close relatives in Alberta having severe diseases early in life. Their drugs and "required care" was expensive and not entirely covered by their private insurance. Their private insurance had caps (annual and/or lifetime), and after, their medical history made it difficult or impossible to get private insurance with adequate coverage.
The bills were significant, but maybe each province has programs to cover the difference for those that cannot afford the bills?
Some people with chronic conditions that fall through the various provincial drug plans are spending fair chunks of money on prescription drugs that may be necessary for them to have a good life.
For example there is a drug you can take before chemo that reduces the side effects, it costs a lot, wasn't covered by the province and isn't free with private insurance. It can make a terrible experience a little more tolerable.
Private insurance in Canada barely exists, and primarily covers prescription coverage and paramedial (acupuncture, chiropracty, TCM, etc.) Inpatient prescriptions are covered by provincial health. Doctor's visits are covered by provincial health. Dental may or may not be covered. Hospital stays, urgent care, ER visits, routine checkups, mental health are covered by provincial health. Health hotlines (call a nurse) are literally free. There's no such thing as "pre-existing". There's no such thing as medical billing.
It varies from province to province in its specifics, but the majority of working-age Canadians have private insurance through their employer. This is expected to cover everything from physiotherapy to psychotherapy to prescription medications.
People without such insurance have a limited patchwork of public programs and usually either have to pay themselves or go without.
Case in point: A friend injured his back, and while the surgery and doctor's consultations were covered, everything else including medication and physiotherapy was not. He ended up spending tens of thousands out of pocket to be able to stand again.
The private health insurance market in Canada is closer to a truly free market and isn't regulated like in the USA, and that means the insurers happily and routinely deny coverage for pre-existing or self-inflicted conditions (as the insurance contract may define them).
Another case in point: A friend of mine is HIV+, and was denied group coverage through his employer. He pays thousands of dollars out of pocket for antivirals every year.
When the public insurer doesn't cover you, it's an absolute wild west of unregulated private insurance coverage and usually boils down to pay or suffer and die.
Private insurance for prescriptions, dental, vision, etc. is offered by most big employers in Canada.
"As CBC News points out, private health insurance is “a crucial part of the system,” and Canadians spent about $43.2 billion on private coverage in 2005."
https://thinkprogress.org/can-canadians-purchase-private-hea...