The first of two posts about the Canadian Health Care system that debunks a lot of the misinformation which is being passed around. We lived in Canada in the mid-eighties and I was mildly surprised at how smoothly everything went. Although we were on one-year residence permits, we were issued a standard credit card size health system card. This was used for payment for doctors, dentists and eye specialists.

At the time we found this to be only mildly extraordinary, as we had been living in Germany under a similar system.

If you try to decipher Medicare Part A, Part B, Part C, and Part D, you can spend a week trying to figure it out.

How does employer-provided healthcare affect non-profits? For one thing it forces your organization to consider the cost of providing health care as a cost of hiring new personnel. In our area, this is around $12,000 per year (and rising by 8% or more per year) for an employee with a spouse and one or two children.

How bad does it have to get before there will be some action on health care at the federal level?