🇨🇦 So public health works only if you pay twice

Alberta just admitted the obvious: the sacred Canadian health-care model is so clogged that people now need a credit card, not a family doctor, to get an MRI, CT, ultrasound, or X-ray. Danielle Smith is selling it as early cancer detection, but the real story is that citizens are being told to fund their own escape hatch from a failing monopoly, as reported. If cancer is found, maybe you get reimbursed later at public rates. Translation: gamble on your own diagnosis first, then beg the system for a partial refund.

The usual suspects are shrieking about two-tier care, as if Canada does not already have a two-tier reality where the connected and affluent navigate delays while everyone else waits in ideological poverty. The province says private clinics must preserve public access, while one provider says self-referred scans could jump to 50,000 or 60,000 a year in a system doing seven million exams. That is not reform. That is a pressure valve on a machine Ottawa-style governance has spent decades overpromising and underdelivering.

🍁 Maple Chronicles