Canada
Related: About this forumGatineau couple discharged from Ottawa family doctor 'shocked,' seeking answers
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-gatineau-family-doctor-discharge-1.7210553#:Bruyère Clinic says serving out-of-province patients becoming increasingly hard
Natalia Goodwin · CBC News · Posted: May 22, 2024 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: May 22
A family from Gatineau, Que., is reeling after being told they will be discharged from their family doctor in Ottawa for a reason they are struggling to agree with because they have Quebec health cards.
Last month Samira Drapeau, Drew Williams and their five-year-old son received separate letters from the Bruyère Family Medicine Centre in Ottawa where the family have been patients for eight years.
Many people in the National Capital Region live on one side of the Ottawa River but work on the other. It's also not uncommon for people on the Quebec side to receive health services in Ottawa.
The letter stated that as of July 31, they would be discharged from the clinic and will no longer have access to services.
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Marcus IM
(3,001 posts)It's like fingernails on a chalkboard listening to my American friends discussing this using mythology and guesses about the Canadian system.
There are few nations with true national and universal healthcare.
One of these nations in the Western hemisphere is Cuba.
carpetbagger
(4,467 posts)The real issue here is localization of state functions, because having a PCP in another province would be a nonstarter in a Cuban-style provincial health system with direct employment.
Canada is similar to the UK and Belgium as federations of distinct peoples or nations, and devolution of state services is one mechanism that keeps those federations intact.
Quebec considers itself a nation, and exerts local control intolerable in multinational communist federations such as the Soviet Union. They have a system to provide care for the people of that nation. This is a convenience issue, although I'm not unaware of the GP staffing problems in Canada.