Navigating Canada's "Postal-Code Lottery"

So far my little handful of posts have been confined to various minor and general issues, but the real purpose of this blog, as I envisioned it, was to help people understand this particular corner of the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Canadian public healthcare system. Until you have a serious illness (or fear you have one, anyway), the Canadian universal healthcare experiment can look like a grand success. In many ways, it still is: spending half what Americans do per capita on healthcare, we still achieve comparable results in terms of survival rates, and superior results in life expectancy.

At the same time, our bureaucratic morasse is creating many more problems than it solves. At the beginning of the year, the Cancer Advocacy Coalition denounced the multitude of different provincial regulations for cancer treatment as a "postal-code lottery": Canadians get different treatment depending on where they live. There are reasons for this, and I hope to explore them later on. For the moment, let's accept that it's true – and that I'll try to help people understand where they fit into that lottery over the coming months.