This is literally comical. Although I believe I had made your acquaintance by the time I had this conversation with my friend, I'm fairly sure you weren't in earshot.
I'm not relating my extensive knowledge of the system, simply relating a conversation I had with a working Canadian who has used the medical insurance system there.
What I'm calling "Supplemental health insurance" was what the employee of the government of Canada told me he was given as one of the forms of compensation for his services to said government. He was very happy to have it when his wife became ill and she was taken care of right away as opposed to having her symptoms treated with drugs till her place in line came up. According to him, she was treated quickly because of their extra insurance. It was this illness that caused me to ask and how this conversation came to be.
He didn't pay extra for it, he is by no means rich and paid no premium for it. He specifically described it as provided by his employer. It did however allow he and his wife a modicum of extra security in the way of insurance over the those whose employers didn't provide it.
I'd be very surprised if ALPA Canada didn't negotiate health insurance for it's pilots with the larger carriers...
Air Canada website "We value your total wellbeing and that of your family; that is why we offer you a wide variety of benefit plans, including health and dental.."
The rest of the world thinks were a bunch of "backwardass fools" for the way we handle healthcare because we are, but, let's not make all these other systems seem like a panacea. Canadians have a certain pride in their system, as they should, but the fact remains the healthcare isn't equal through the system. Theirs is most likely better than ours, but, I still don't trust our government to handle it.
...and having walked the streets of a few Canadian cities on RONs, they really do seem to have more than their share of homeless who appear to be suffering some form of psychological problem, but I'm no
@Maximilian_Jenius .
This is blatantly false. What you're calling "supplemental health insurance" is actually premium boutique care insurance. It allows those people to get premium care like home visits by health care professionals. In other words, the kind of stuff that only rich people get here.
You should talk to the thousands of Canadian ALPA members about how this stuff really works in Canada. I was fortunate to serve in a national position where I got to talk to them on a regular basis. Whenever somebody from the States said something like you said above, they'd look at him like he had three heads and ask where he got that nonsense, then tell us how the rest of the the world thinks we're a bunch of backwardsass fools for clinging to the abhorrent system that we have.