About a year after I was diagnosed with breast cancer,
she was also diagnosed with breast cancer.
This is the spreadsheet that shows everything
that she was billed.
In Ontario, we don't have any of that.
My name is Catherine Gordon.
I live in Toronto.
And I recently recovered from breast cancer
and my sister had it a year after I did.
And so I wrote an article about it.
We're both from Toronto.
We were born and raised here, essentially.
And my sister, Karen's husband, got a job in California,
so they moved down there.
And they've been there for a very long time,
and now they're both American citizens.
Karen had a brain tumor about 35 years ago
and recovered from that remarkably.
She went through radiation.
It was difficult.
And then about a year after I was diagnosed with breast cancer,
she was also diagnosed with breast cancer.
She had surgery and came out on radiation like I did.
And now she's recovering.
We were sitting in the kitchen at her house.
I was down visiting while she was going through her chemo.
And she pulled out a file folder of bills.
And so I said, what's that?
And she said, well, this is all the bills
that I have to look at and approve and pay.
And so I was intrigued and kind of surprised
because in Ontario, all of that is invisible to us.
We don't see any bills.
And so we just focus on getting better.
There were bills from about 50 different service providers,
even though she'd been to only two hospitals
and maybe three clinics.
So she was getting bills from people she'd never met
or didn't, for services she'd never met.
She didn't really understand and had to make a judgment call
about whether it was correct.
Okay, so this is, when Karen showed me all of this,
it occurred to me that it would be an interesting story
to talk about what going through cancer is like
in Canada versus the States.
And we're sisters, right?
So I asked her to send me bills so that I could review them.
And I asked her also to send me the list of expenses
and how it all worked with the insurance company
so I could research that.
I think if you want to look at numbers,
here are the numbers, right?
This is the spreadsheet that shows everything
that she was billed in the two-year periods.
The insurance company for Karen's treatment end-to-end
was billed about $450,000.
They managed to negotiate that down to about $150,000.
And then Karen's portion of that was about $15,000.
So that was her copay, or deductible,
I'm not sure, the proper terms.
And on top of that, she paid her insurance premiums
and costs for drugs, things like that.
Here's one for $3,640 that was negotiated down to $920,
and then Karen's share of that was $230.
Here's one that was $45,000
that the insurance company negotiated down to $8,500,
and Karen's pay on that was $400.
In Ontario, we don't have any of that.
So what was the experience like for you getting billed?
There were no bills.
My treatment was simple,
and I was able to just focus on getting better.
What I observed with Karen
was that she was going through considerable amount of stress
on top of the stress of getting better
and going through surgery and so on.
She had to think about and worry about
and spend time on the phone with things like this.
It's a level of stress.
I don't think anybody should have to go through.
I was diagnosed, and I was referred to the surgeon,
and I was in that surgeon's office the same day.
There was no wait time.
There was no wait time for surgery.
There was no wait time for chemo.
There was no wait time for radiation.
It's really well organized.
For me, it's just part of my life.
I don't worry about cost ever.
I go to my doctor once a year for my checkup.
I have all of my tests.
I have regular mammograms now.
And I think that I'm encouraged to take care of myself
because all of these tests are available to me
and I don't have to worry about paying them.
If there's an emergency, I'm treated well
and with kindness and quickly.
The Canadian system, I'm sure, isn't perfect,
but certainly my experience with it
is that I've never had to be concerned.
I never worry about it.
I'm taking care of it.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
That's really interesting.
Thank you so much.
