I have turned down multiple opportunities to work in the USA for these reasons.

A friend told me her story years ago and it made me never want to work there.

She was a single mother in her early 30s. Her husband/father of her child died in a traffic accident when the child was very young (around 2yo). When her son was around 6 he developed a chronic medical condition. Not curable but manageable without awful impact to his life. However it was expensive to manage. She had decent insurance where she worked so it wasn't a massive issue (I think she paid around $200/month for medication).

However she was being sexual harassed and bullied by the company owner. She tried for years to change jobs but couldn't. Many times she was offered a job but the insurance package wasn't as good and so she could not afford the medication her son needed with the changes.

She was effectively held hostage with a boss who used to make her life miserable because of a healthcare plan. She was scared to go to work but she had no choice. No family support, etc.

It took her over four years to finally be free of that place when she moved country for a better life for her and her son (which is how we met and became friends).

She is a wonderful person who is doing amazing now. Last we spoke she was happily married. Not spoken in a while but think I will give her a call tonight to catch up. Thanks for the indirect reminder to do so.

I was in a similar situation. My wife didn't work, and I was doing the team lead thing. The moment my wife became pregnant, the employer immediately became abusive. I'm talking about working nights, weekends, mornings, late at night, and working on Christmas, on Thanksgiving. No amount of effort seemed to satisfy them.

One day, I was working on this feature that exercised the system in a way that had never been done before, and it was going predictably terrible. I had been working since 4:30 am, it was something like 8:00 pm, I couldn't even see straight I was so tired. I get up to go home and get some rest, and my manager says, "Oceanghost! I need to know when this feature is going to ready and tested!"

I just said, "Have a nice night."

I never wrote another line of code for that company. They fired me for "Sending a rude email" a few days later.

This is really what those opposed to universal health care want—a society where you have no dignity or power or ability to stand up for yourself.

I don’t understand for the life of me why any American (I am one) thinks that the status quo where your insurance is tied to your job isn’t insane.

Everyone understands it's insane, but the people with the power to change it have fantastic employer-provided health care, so why would they change things?

In all seriousness, if tax laws were changed to eliminate the employer advantage, things would change. But until then...

I just got my tax information for the year. My insurance is pretty good. I pay around $100 a month for family coverage, my company pays $21000 a year to subsidize it.

But, I still think it’s insane. We’ve made all sorts of decisions because of employee provided health insurance.

My now-wife met at work. We knew that our company was on its last legs, she took a job right before she was laid off making less money just to make sure that she had insurance for her and her sons (we weren’t married at the time).

I was laid off when the company was sold but I got a contract with one of our clients. I first looked for insurance on the open market. No one would sell me insurance because of a pre-existing condition. My “condition” wasn’t anything like cancer and I was part time fitness instructor, and ran half marathons within the last year.

Sure I could get CORBA, which I did, but less than four months later the acquiring company cancelled their insurance plan and outsourced all development to India.

I proposed to my wife and we were planning to get married in six months. She thought it was crazy I was helping to support her (she took a lower paying job) and paying insurance. She said let’s go to the courthouse and get married so I can get on her insurance.

She now works part time for the school system mostly so we can have insurance while I jump back and forth between salaried jobs and contract jobs.

Having universal health care is great in Canada. If you break your leg or get sick you don’t have to worry about going bankrupt. My chiropractor spent 1.5M on cancer therapy for her husband and he still died. There are stories of moms waiting outside the emergency room with a thermometer checking their children’s temperature because they couldn’t afford the copay. My pregnant babysitter had to go to emergency and paid $1000 for a copay.

But Canada only has 3200 ICU beds across the entire country. For a country of 35M. Canada has 2.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people, 36th out of 40 in the OECD. The US is only 31st with 2.8 hospital beds per 1000, similar to Canada.

My friends in Canada have had to wait months for things like MRIs, seeing specialists, etc. I got an MRI next day, $100 copay. Just last week one of my friends’ boyfriend had a “dark spot” on his liver show up on a CT scan, but the doctor never followed up and my friend couldn’t reach the doctor via phone. Another of my friends had to wait 2 years for autism therapy and right now has engaged in multiple protests in Toronto because Doug Ford has completely fucked up autism therapy funding.

So there are good things and bad things about it. In Canada you don’t have to pay but you are trapped by its bureaucracy that keeps its employees paid and you have no options. In the US you have options but it could be very very expensive.

> My friends in Canada have had to wait months for things like MRIs

It seems to be dependent on urgency. I've got what's likely a minor labral tear that isn't significantly affecting my quality of life where the MRI is expected to take months. On the other hand, when I had a potential TIA I had an MRI done within a day.

Private clinics are also pretty readily available for imaging, for those with the means/will to pay.

Despite being "trapped in a bureaucracy" Canadians experience healthcare outcomes that are, on average, better than those experienced by Americans. Care is prioritized by need and urgency - not by money, but this results in a fairer and more equitable system.

On the other hand, done estimates are that there are an excess of ICU beds in the US and an overuse of them.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4351597/

evidence suggests that in the presence of available ICU beds physicians tend to admit lower-risk patients to the ICU and use the ICU more for care at the end of life (4–6). These findings suggest that overuse of ICU beds may be mediated, at least in part, by excess supply. Yet the number of ICU beds in the United States continues to increase, from 69,300 in 1985 to 93,955 in 2005 (2, 7).

Sure we have to wait for non urgent matters, but my step-mom died of cancer nearly 2 years ago, so I can attest of the efficiency of the system in her case. Each time she felt bad enough to go to the hospital, she was taken care of in matters of minutes in the emergency. Any necessary scans were done quite quickly.

Getting a diagnostic was a bit tough though, she had to get multiple appointment before they found the cancer, but I think that's mostly because cancer can be hard to diagnose. Once they found it, it was too late and what was initially potentially treatable lung cancer, became 4th stage and reached her bone.

The day she was asked between fighting or not a lost cause is the day I understood how our system is so much superior to the US one. The government bought us 4 or 5 more months with her. There 4-5 months that would have cost so much, 4-5 months that she wouldn't have agreed to if they had to pay.

Once I forgot to renew my insurance card. I was still insured, but I just couldn't benefit from it directly, which made me postpone it later and later, until it was needed after hitting my knee quite bad. That day I also was thankful for our system, because I hesitated to go... it was the first time I experienced what so many people have constantly experience in the US. If I still had that card, I would have never ever thought of any of that, I would just go. That was for a situation where I would have been able to get it refunded too, imagine that. Finally it was only about 80$ to get a scan of my knee, the people at the reception didn't even know how to charge me, that was funny. The funniest is that you would probably save money by getting that scan here in Canada, I have no doubt that it would be much more than 80$ in the US and you would still have to pay your full 100$ copay.

In the US you have options if you have disposable assets somewhere on the order of cash payment for required services (or have an exceptional insurance plan, but chances are very good those two are correlated).

Otherwise your ceiling looks more or less like Canadian care (your floor, of course, can be considerably worse).

To be fair to the thread however, the food industry is brutal on employees in Canada as well.

Most restaurant employees are paid below minimum wage and expected to make up the rest in tips.

Coming in to work while you are sick is socially accepted. Probably because everybody in the entire country gets some form of cold or flu at least once over the winter... it's almost inevitable.

I just came back from a upscale cafe where the person who served me my food literally coughed into their hand before touching my plate in front of 20 customers and nobody (but me) so much as even batted an eyelash.

The free healthcare in Canada is great... but you'd be lucky to have a job waiting for you in the food industry if you took 3 or 4 weeks off because you "just had a cold".

I was a busboy in a high end restaurant for a few years here up in Canada and I wouldn't wish that punishment on my worst enemy.

I remember my manager being furiously frustrated with me when I handed in my 2 weeks notice, because he knew it would be a hell of a task to find a hard working replacement as naive as younger-me used to be.

> Most restaurant employees are paid below minimum wage and expected to make up the rest in tips.

To note, only three provinces (the three most populous) have separate minimum wages for servers.

> Coming in to work while you are sick is socially accepted.

I hate this so much. I cause enough of a stink in my office about this that people in my department don't do it, but it boggles my mind that people with a lenient remote work policy and unlimited sick days would still choose to come into the office when sick if I didn't complain to HR about it.

It's just plain bad for business, which is the main aspect of it all that I don't understand.

If one employee comes into work sick, chances are everybody who works in close proximity to them all day will be sick by the end of the week.

"We are all sick because so-and-so was sick last week." is a phrase I hear constantly coming out of my significant other's mouth.

She works in the food industry as well.

Surely that must lower profits in some way, shape or form.

Whether it's customers being wary of buying your products in the future (I personally will not go back into that cafe with the hand-coughing server for example), or your entire work force just being sluggish and high on cold medication for a week straight.

I suppose it doesn't matter in the eyes of the manager because everybody is going to come into work as usual whether they are sick or not anyways.

I asked her what she thought about sealing viruses inside of dark airtight packaging that is kept cool until sale, (they sell packaged chocolate) and she just assumed it was nothing to worry about.

When living and working in Canada I was surprised that taxes were pretty much the same as what I’d pay in California.

OECD data seems to back that up. https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffingtonpost.ca/amp/2018/05...

Income taxes yes, but there are taxes like the HST, gasoline taxes, alcohol taxes that bump up the tax rate significantly.

Taxes as a percentage of GDP Canada - 33% USA - 24%

[1]https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-canada.pdf

If that USA figure is just tax, and doesn't include what people have to pay for health insurance, it's not really comparable, is it?

Unfortunately many of the best jobs are in CA and other high tax states (additional income tax, sales tax, etc.) where it starts becoming much closer.

Also unclear if that link takes into account family transfers like the original link.

Yet the cost of living is just as high in certain areas (Toronto and Vancouver) and the pay is abysmal.

The offers I would get in Toronto and Vancouver would often be 25-30% of the ones I’d get in NYC and SF.

You don’t have to live in Toronto or Vancouver and you’d still get health coverage

If you chose to live in either of those cities that would be on you

In the US it seems like the government goes in favor to the employers, while in Canada, it's in favor to the employee. There's no such thing as "at-will" employment here in Canada. You can't be fired for no reason.

Is it is big thing in America now to claim we don't have things we do like time off when we are sick or hospitals to treat us? What on earth is this post about??

Umm, not everyone gets time off when they're sick. Did you read the linked thread? Many more people can't actually afford to go to a hospital without incurring irresponsible financial burden. Regardless of whether this is the "correct" decision by whatever calculation you do, there are plenty, plenty of people who arrive at the conclusion that they cannot afford to take work off and cannot afford to go to the hospital.

Unfortunately many of those same people occupy "high centrality" nodes in our society - they handle food, they deliver packages, they operate or take mass transit, they clean homes/workplaces/restaurants, etc.

Looks like around 40% of the US work force has no paid sick leave:

https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2...

Damn, that's hard. In Germany we have six weeks per illness. Meaning you get up to six weeks for your broken leg, another six for arm and so on. Insurance to cover up to a year isn't to expensive neither if you start early. Sounds like paradise.

When you're health insurance is tied to your work, if you lost the ability to work, you are screwed. You will stop earning money, your savings will evaporate, then your health insurance will evaporate, and then you get destroyed by medical bills. This happened in me in 2006 after a bad bicycle accident.

And all of this is assuming the health insurance company doesn't weasel out of paying for your bills while you have insurance because of a clerical error you made when applying for health insurance in the first place.

All of this also assumes that you have thousands of dollars to pay for deductibles before your health insurance kicks in at all.

Most folks don't have paid time off when they are sick. Even if they do, they'll still get in trouble for attendance when they are sick - and those days are often limited to 5 per year.

The big issue is that nothing is required, with the big exception of FMLA. FMLA doesn't cover small places nor part-time employees, though, and it doesn't mean you'll be paid.

Many people cannot afford to go to the doctor either.

There is absolutely no safety net for people.

> The big issue is that nothing is required

The most populous state in the country requires a minimum of 3 days paid sick leave for employees: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Paid_Sick_Leave.htm

Employers cant legally prevent employees from using this time. But, given that low-income people have little ability to fight violations of the law, I'd hardly be surprised to hear that people are forced (or feel forced) to work while sick.

"If an employee does not have any accrued or available paid sick leave, however, (e.g., if the employee has already used all of his or her accrued and available paid sick leave under the employer’s policy, including as consistent with Labor Code section 233), and if the employee has an unscheduled absence that would otherwise violate the employer’s attendance policy, the paid sick leave law does not prohibit the employer from giving the employee an “occurrence” for such absence, even if the employee was actually sick and/or could have used paid sick leave for the absence if he or she had any such leave accrued. The paid sick leave law does not “protect” all time off taken by an employee for illness or related purposes; it “protects” only an employee’s accrued and available paid sick leave as specified in the statute."

Sure, and three days is pretty slim - its easy to be pretty sick for three days with a single occurrence of illness. But the above quote is just a wordy way of saying "you aren't entitled to more sick leave than the 3 days provided for by this law".

Federal law [0] says you cant be fired for taking up to 12 weeks off per year to take care of, among other things, "major illness" (understood to mean that it does not cover things like colds or flu, unless they require hospitalization). But, it also only applies to businesses with over 50 employees, so non-chain restaurants are unlikely to follow this law.

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

Ok. But honestly, the other 69% of Americans that don't live in California don't get this. Not only that, but it can somehow vary by employer.

Other places simply have it for everyone, and a union negotiation won't take away the safety net, as it is a right. It can only add benefits to the minimum.

There's a fair number of state laws by now:

https://www.workplacefairness.org/paid-sick-leave

I haven't reviewed them all, but the ones I've looked at are pretty meager, ~40 hours a year (and often conditional on employer size), which won't do much other than take the edge off if you get more than a little sick.

are you being obtuse intentionally? in the usa the hospital will send you a bill, thst is often ruinous

It's pretty clear that he's stating Canada has a larger welfare net than in the US.

Take paid holiday. The US has no federal state minimum paid vacation. In Canada, it's 16-30 days.

Lots of people in America don't have sick leave. Lots of people in America can't afford treatment for illness until they have to go to the emergency room.

who is we exactly? just because you and your bubble do get healthcare and sick time doesn't "we" do.

https://www.uphelp.org/nearly-half-all-american-adults-are-u...