OMFG Anesthesiologists should never been seen as a money maker. OMFG. I’m going to die of a rage stroke.

I’m Canadian, so I already find the entire notion of being charged for being sick offensive. But then being charged like this? Oh fuck that shit. Fuck it right in the ass.

That should be illegal. Straight up fucking illegal.

Yet another vote for Pocketcasts.

The first time I got the flu - the proper, honest-to-go flu - I thought I was going to die. I wasn’t stuffed up. I wasn’t coughing. I was shaking, achy, out of control temperature, my pores hurt, etc. It was a couple of weeks before I even began to feel normal.

We don’t have very much HFCS in our food, honestly. We often have different recipes for Canada than in the US. i.e. Coke doesn’t have HFCS here. Neither does ketchup. etc etc.

Canadians say there is similar income inequality, but honestly it’s not always comparable. We have free healthcare, but there is access…

I can’t get over that the US doesn’t have family leave. Like COME ON.

That’s really cool, and really necessary!

Sidenote: I am adopted. I loathe how the “what about adoption” people treat adopting a fucking baby the same way as adopting a damn cat from the SPCA.

It is stressful, but it would be so much more if I had to think about money on top of my health.

I honestly don’t know if we’re more stringent in Canada, but we don’t have the same level of lobbying going on. Like, HFCS isn’t in a lot of stuff here - it’s often in American-branded things, like Tony Roma’s Famous BBQ sauce. But it’s not in beans or pop.

Agreed. It’s the kind of thing that everyone wants to point at one thing and say THAT RIGHT THERE but it just seems far more complicated. Honestly, it seems like poverty is the underlying cause in a lot of causes, and yeah...that’s not fixed with a quick change to hospital protocols.

I can only imagine. I’m also in the process of being diagnosed for whatever is causing my chronic pain, and I can’t imagine what this would cost a working poor american with shitty insurance.

This year alone, I’ve had a breathing test, Xrays (neck, mid back, hips, hands, feet), four sets of blood work (monitoring…

I have this vision of a mobile preventive medicine team. A couple of nurses with a giant van that stops in rural areas and poor areas. Anyone can access the mobile unit for free. They check the basics: heart, lungs, the mini ECG ambulances uses, blood sugar, blood pressure. I can see that alone helping so many women…

Yeah, that’s kinda like how it is here. It’s not consistent across the country yet, but it’s improving. But, it’s still nurses doing it, which is a huge (positive) impact on all aspects.

An RN midwife would greatly cut down on the cost of births for everyone, too. It reduces the immediate cost for the low-risk pregnancy, sure, but surely it must also cut down on unnecessary hospital costs and procedures due to protocol, so that more attention is spent on the high-risk patients. Then, since less…

I still wonder if it’s less about weight directly and more about lack of preventive health care even before pregnancy. i.e. if someone doesn’t know they have high blood pressure before pregnancy, they might not have it under control when they get pregnant (probably not the best example; it was just the fist example…

Canadian women wait longer than their American counterparts. In Canada, most babies are now born to women 30 and older, and an increasing amount being born to women 35-39.

Universe health care access would make a huge improvement, honestly. Women wouldn’t have to worry about blood test costs, additional testing, will see a doctor earlier for problems, etc.

Alberta has a midwife program whereby home birth with a midwife is free, and the midwife is a RN. It’s hard to access to the program because, obviously, the demand is overwhelming, but nevertheless it’s there, giving people more options that are still safe and lessens the overall impact on the system for low-risk…