Medical Insurance

I was tossing around, thinking "should I post my recent interests in music?" but then remembered that I'm meant to be documenting all the good and bad involved in going to Canada and other things I'm doing. Kind of as a log and guide to anyone else wanting to try the same.

So recently I've been wrestling with health insurance, and working out whether I really need travel insurance instead. Turns out that I should get travel insurance for about a month to cover health and belongings, and then switch to regular private health insurance to enhance the government programmes.

Note the plural in 'programmes'! Canadians see themselves as independent provinces loosely grouped together, so each province has their own Medicare-like system available to provincial residents. Different healthcare costs depending what province you're in. There's some kind of "out-of-province" scheme I still haven't sorted out. They have a relatively weak PBS-like system, so private insurance is still a good idea anyway, though general medical (GPs, emergencies, etc) are free. One good thing is it applies to residents not just citizens. :)