my first dental cleaning in Vancouver - about time you'd say, but there was like a 3-month wait period after making the appointment - perhaps, because I looked up ratemyMD and found one of the top 5 dentists. So the X-ray revealed one bad tooth that needed a filling and perhaps even a root-canal (!!!!??) - this made me throw a huge fit of denial, which surprised the doctor and so he opened his mouth to reveal like 10 crowns!!! I didn't tell him I intended to get to 50 without a single filling and also wondered if I made the right choice - I mean the man has obviously not taken care of his own teeth. A week or so later they would do a filling, and it seemed I was just short of a root canal, and they put a white crown (that cost me $50 out of pocket!!!! - they didn't even ask if they could put the silver one, that was in fact covered by my insurance... I might have opted for the silver, since it was an upper tooth and since I am a bit shorter than average people, the chances are no one would actually see the color of my crown... oh well). Anyway, it was also the first time I was anesthetized, which freaked me out since I didn't know how less is normal, to feel once you are been anesthetized - so it was this big drama of me asking for more anaesthesia and wanting the dentist to hold the mirror to my mouth every 2 minutes so I see what he was doing - so of course now there is a small roughness, that I will have to wait for a month or two before I get smoothed out.
This is the view from the dentists office - looking directly down my street - somewhere at the end of this picture is my apartment, eclipsed by the giant high-rises in the horizon.
Anyway, this all made me think of one of my friends from MN, who shuffles back and forth between there and Van and he is this former Soviet Union person so he is all-glory-to-socialism and is so enamoured by the Canadian health care system, compared to the US one, and he specifically talked about getting a dental cleaning appointment in Vancouver within a week of calling... so either he is lying, or he lives in some God-foresaken suburb - I am going to go with the latter... a lot of people tend to refer to suburbs of big cities as the big cities themselves... I beg to disagree, and disagree very much...
Anyway, I like universal health care because it allows affordable health care to everyone - so go universal health care, yes! But, I must admit, as a poor grad student at UMN, I had way better health care than I ever had in Montréal (maybe Vancouver might be different, I haven't been to the hospital yet) - in the UMN hospital there was a sign that said 'speak to us if you have been waiting here for more than 15mins.' and in Montréal, even when I went to the supposedly faster clinics, I had to wait for 1hr and 20mins, with a killing stomach-ulcer pain, before I got seen! But that was regular hospital; ok, so in UMN, you had to make a dental hygiene appointment 6months ahead, but you have to remember that was in the dental school - I tried to get in to the UBC dental school, they wouldn't even consider me unless I had some dental problem (makes sense - they are after all a teaching hospital for dentists where cleaning is not that important I guess)... So, yes I agree, I was one of the lucky few who got to go to a large enough school with good enough health insurance in the US - but it is indeed a little disconcerting that one had better health care when one was earning less than 1/3rd of the current income... I am not saying, "Canada c'mon get with the US program" - I imagine the Canadian system is better on the overall, but it is not as spotless as people like to think...
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