I have been living abroad for 8 years and in Spain for 5. I cannot overstate how much better my quality of life is here. 

Cheap healthcare. Affordable food. Affordable rent. I feel very safe, very relaxed, and I nap every day (as is customary). Amazing restaurants, kind people. Walkable (I didn’t have a car until this year). Lots of holidays. 

I am so grateful to be here, every single day, and I work hard to integrate into the community to thank them for their kindness. 

Cons: I miss having a clothes dryer (I could buy one but I rent), and sometimes I get tired of not speaking really good Spanish, like in hospitals or government-related situations. Visas suck and for some people it’s not easy to pick up and move, but there are a few different options like the digital nomad visa or a work visa. 

When it comes down to it, the U.S. hasn’t been home to me for a long time, and won’t be again. .

Moved from the US to Canada 10 years ago.

I absolutely cannot understate this in any way, but things have been *so much better* for me here.

In the US, I always struggled to maintain health insurance. Even when I had a good job, almost every full-time position I worked required me to work several months before I was eligible to apply for health insurance. Before lining up the good full-time positions, I would be working a small handful of part-time positions simultaneously just to make ends meet, and that did not make me eligible for health insurance without paying privately out of pocket. Private health insurance out of pocket is just not affordable for young adults, in my experience. Most everyone I knew my age was either still on their parents insurance or just didn't have coverage. The only option when you got sick was either to pay an astronomical amount out of pocket to see a doctor, go without treatment (which is what I mostly did), or go to emergency. Because of this, I spent most of my life worried about getting sick- which caused me a great deal of stress- which caused me to get sick *a lot*.



When I did have health insurance, the copay still made it difficult to afford seeing a doctor. If I didn't have $75-100 in my bank account, I had to just deal with being sick. I was already living pay check to pay check, and missing work meant more money I didn't have, so being out even more on top of that made it so hard to justify seeing a doctor that absolutely did not care about you and would do nothing except talk to you for maybe 3-4 minutes.


In Canada, I spend far less than I spent in the states, I've had incredible experiences both with my PCP's and in the hospital, and I get sick way less because I'm not constantly worried about going broke from getting sick.

I could write a novel about the differences and how much I've loved it here, but I will end this with just two things. I once passed out at a friends house when I lived in the US from something I couldn't afford to see a doctor for. A friend took me to hospital, they gave me fluids, I was there for maybe 2 hours, and I got a bill for $38,000. My mother, who had phenomenal insurance that my dad paid privately for (so not just through her job, though she had coverage through her job as well) and my family still paid $500,000 out of pocket for her cancer treatments. The doctors stopped taking her pain seriously, stopped running tests on her, and she took the rest of her pain meds one night in an attempt to end her life. One $5,000 ambulance ride and some tests later, they finally realized "oh whoops the cancer has spread haha didn't realize that's where your pain was coming from." She died less than 6 months later. My dad was still making payments on her treatments long after she passed.

Two weeks ago my husband had a UC flare up here in Canada. He had to go to emergency. We had a bed in 20 minutes, he was admitted a few hours later, they said *verbatim*, "hey, we could give you a referral, but we think it would be better to just have you do a colonoscopy now, would that be OK?" He had a colonoscopy done in the hospital about 14 hours later, and the next day was sent home with a treatment plan. We had a fantastic private room, the staff was incredible, and everyone that worked there *actually cared*. OHIP covered everything. The only thing we had to worry about was filing the short-term disability paperwork through his union to get reimbursed for his time off.

Oh and when we had a baby? 12 months of parental leave.

I will absolutely never return to the hellscape that is the US. Vive le Canada.