>>you can go to a private hospital in short order to get your [insert medical care]
I don't even know where that would be, although I suppose the insurance company would tell me.
I gather that I'm fortunate to have gotten in with a primary-care doctor (and a good one at that), but *having* done that I really haven't had many problems with the public healthcare system (*knocks on wood*). All of the waits seem like reasonable triaging: it's always been very clear that had my need for [insert medical care] been more urgent, I would have been treated sooner. (The only unreasonable wait that's coming to mind was in fact with a plastic surgeon (regarding keloid treatment) who was *not* government-covered†.) Specialists do have a bad habit of assigning you appointment times without asking you first what a good time would be, but you *can* start negotiations if they give you a bad one.
Someday, most likely (and perhaps quite soon), I'll have supplemental health insurance through my job and will see how much value I get out of it.
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>>Financially speaking, you are lucky to have cheap tastes
Some of it's luck, but I think "nocebo effect from stuff being expensive" and "more willing to test whether something is to my taste if it's cheap" are also factors. Although maybe some of the luck is in experiencing that nocebo effect.
(Semi-related: in my travels through the personal-finance blogosphere I've encountered a lot of pushback against the Latte Factor. They're concerned about people straining the gnat and swallowing the camel, worrying too much about optimising small expenses and not enough about the much bigger gains to be found in optimising the Big Three expenses (housing/transport/food). And while there's a point in there...when it comes to lattes specifically, I find the way our culture normalises caffeine addiction very disturbing? Especially given tolerance: presumably a lot of them aren't even enhancing their performance much at this point, they're just getting back up to baseline. It feels like...not just a waste of resources (though it is that), but also a waste of attack surface: they have this extra vulnerability in their lives that they didn't need to have and--since, again, tolerance--are getting very questionable amounts of value out of.)
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>>and go on two-month trips to the USA.
Now that is *definitely* a good reason to buy private health insurance.
I'm pretty sure this is *also* a nocebo thing, but I swear when you go to the States you can *feel* absence-of-public-healthcare permeating everything, a metaphysical brittleness in the fabric of society. I always breathe a sigh of relief when I cross back through the border and feel Canadian societal fabric wrap around me again.
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>>Also: I'd be interested in any high-quality recommendations WRT finance blogs. I haven't run into anything good in the genre for a good while now
I don't know about "good", necessarily, plus I've been focusing on Canadian stuff. I'm pretty sure I like Michael James on Money; My Own Advisor feels slightly off (overly polished?) but worth keeping an eye on; Modern FImily feels somewhat uncomfortably reminiscent of the parenting/fashion/romance-novel bloggers I used to work for, but she's a dual US/Canada citizen who spends ~$30k/year on [two adults + one child + house-debt interest], so she strikes me as unusually likely to have relevant-to-my-life tips.
I know I've seen some people with .com.au website addresses in the comments of these blogs, but I haven't looked into them.
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†So I'm told, anyway: he never actually charged me for that treatment. Possibly his plan was to charge me at the end of the three rounds, but I decided after the boredom-followed-by-agony-followed-by-lingering-pain of the first round that I'd rather keep the keloids than go through that two more times. ↩
no subject
I don't even know where that would be, although I suppose the insurance company would tell me.
I gather that I'm fortunate to have gotten in with a primary-care doctor (and a good one at that), but *having* done that I really haven't had many problems with the public healthcare system (*knocks on wood*). All of the waits seem like reasonable triaging: it's always been very clear that had my need for [insert medical care] been more urgent, I would have been treated sooner. (The only unreasonable wait that's coming to mind was in fact with a plastic surgeon (regarding keloid treatment) who was *not* government-covered†.) Specialists do have a bad habit of assigning you appointment times without asking you first what a good time would be, but you *can* start negotiations if they give you a bad one.
Someday, most likely (and perhaps quite soon), I'll have supplemental health insurance through my job and will see how much value I get out of it.
---
>>Financially speaking, you are lucky to have cheap tastes
Some of it's luck, but I think "nocebo effect from stuff being expensive" and "more willing to test whether something is to my taste if it's cheap" are also factors. Although maybe some of the luck is in experiencing that nocebo effect.
(Semi-related: in my travels through the personal-finance blogosphere I've encountered a lot of pushback against the Latte Factor. They're concerned about people straining the gnat and swallowing the camel, worrying too much about optimising small expenses and not enough about the much bigger gains to be found in optimising the Big Three expenses (housing/transport/food). And while there's a point in there...when it comes to lattes specifically, I find the way our culture normalises caffeine addiction very disturbing? Especially given tolerance: presumably a lot of them aren't even enhancing their performance much at this point, they're just getting back up to baseline. It feels like...not just a waste of resources (though it is that), but also a waste of attack surface: they have this extra vulnerability in their lives that they didn't need to have and--since, again, tolerance--are getting very questionable amounts of value out of.)
---
>>and go on two-month trips to the USA.
Now that is *definitely* a good reason to buy private health insurance.
I'm pretty sure this is *also* a nocebo thing, but I swear when you go to the States you can *feel* absence-of-public-healthcare permeating everything, a metaphysical brittleness in the fabric of society. I always breathe a sigh of relief when I cross back through the border and feel Canadian societal fabric wrap around me again.
---
>>Also: I'd be interested in any high-quality recommendations WRT finance blogs. I haven't run into anything good in the genre for a good while now
I don't know about "good", necessarily, plus I've been focusing on Canadian stuff. I'm pretty sure I like Michael James on Money; My Own Advisor feels slightly off (overly polished?) but worth keeping an eye on; Modern FImily feels somewhat uncomfortably reminiscent of the parenting/fashion/romance-novel bloggers I used to work for, but she's a dual US/Canada citizen who spends ~$30k/year on [two adults + one child + house-debt interest], so she strikes me as unusually likely to have relevant-to-my-life tips.
I know I've seen some people with .com.au website addresses in the comments of these blogs, but I haven't looked into them.
---
†So I'm told, anyway: he never actually charged me for that treatment. Possibly his plan was to charge me at the end of the three rounds, but I decided after the boredom-followed-by-agony-followed-by-lingering-pain of the first round that I'd rather keep the keloids than go through that two more times. ↩