Like imagine you suffer injuries in an armed robbery, or from a hurricane or other severe climactic event. Do the hospitals still expect you to pay money even in those cases? I imagine it also applies to police brutality.
I ask because an acquaintance got a broken leg from being ran over by police in a protest recently and, naturally, everybody just called an ambulance and they got to the hospital and that was that, because free healthcare here is a universal right (even if severely underfunded). But then with the recent protests in the US I realised even getting a broken finger from being handcuffed could actually cost people real money.
The lack of universal healthcare coverage in the US is not the only problems of healthcare management in Western countries. The poor planning by Canadian government and bad treatment of Canadian nurses encourages many nurses to either quit their nursing career, continue their nursing career in the US, or move to the private healthcare sector. Even the initiative to hire more foreign nurses does not compensate for the shortage of nurses. This creates a vicious cycle where the low nurses per demand puts more unsustainable workload on the remaining nurses which, in turn, cause more nurses to quit their jobs. The nurse shortage also creates shortage of senior nurses that can train new nurses for the vicious cycle. The most absurd part of this is that the Canadian media is focusing the public attention to the danger of Donald Trump and “repressive” governments on other countries while negating public attention to the vicious cycle of nurse shortage.