Let me bitch and moan and be embarrassed a little bit here. I spent four-and-a-half hours trying to cross into Canada on Wednesday, August 19th.

US-Canadian Border, 1st Attempt

Now, to be fair, an hour of that was me biking back from the border to Oroville and then biking back from Oroville to the border. And another forty-five minutes was spent, combined, in first the Oroville Library trying to locate some affordable health insurance (while fending off the brilliant IMs of Mr. Maxx Fanucci) and second pleading with the nice folks at the Oroville Windemere real-estate agency to please let me use their printer as the one at the library wasn’t working (part was due on Tuesday). And then, well, I probably spent fifteen minutes in line waiting to get rejected from entering Canada, and another twenty waiting in the line back to the U.S. after the Canadians suggested I “withdraw my application for entrance”. So really, I prolly only spent a little bit over two hours in the Canadian border security waiting room.

[I would like to point out here, as an aside, that it took me, and an entire train of other passengers only FOUR hours to cross from Hungary into the Ukraine last summer. Is this a fair comparison? I mean, on one hand, you've got the former Iron Curtain, men with machine guns speaking Russian or Ukrainian, but not the English or German you have, you being the only American on the train, them actually having to physically lift the cars off their carriages to switch them from the western gauge to the eastern gauge, and, on the other, you've got...]

I knew I was off to a bad start when the border guard asked me when was the last time I visited Canada and I said, “Oh, I don’t know, pretty recently…two or three years, actually, I can’t remember, well, maybe, gosh, was it ten years, 1999, geez, wow, I used to come up here all the time, and, wow, ten years.” It immediately got worse when she asked me how long I was going to be in Canada, and whether I had enough money to support myself while I was there, and how much this was, and could I PROVE that I had this money. And then it got worse when she asked me if I had health insurance, and being a basically honest sort who doesn’t have any health insurance (ever since having left my job at the end of July), and also knowing, that I couldn’t prove that I did have it, I said, “no”.

Off to the waiting room with me.

I hoped it might be perfectly cursory.

But, I sensed trouble when I gleaned that the other folks in the waiting room with me were:

• A trucker who had been caught illegally shipping something or other a few months ago.
• A woman and her boyfriend, she with numerous drug convictions and an outstanding warrant of some sort.
• A family of Germans.
• And a kindly middle-aged Albertan woman who had been pulled aside for a “random check”.

After about 45 minutes they let the trucker through, and the Germans, and (after apologetically searching her car) the Albertan.  And they sent me and the convicted felon and her boyfriend back to the U.S.

I think, basically, I caught a border guard on a bad day.  And even though I had showered the night before, I probably looked a little questionable with my hair all akimbo and laundry drying on the back of my bike.  Once the questions about money and health insurance were asked, everything else followed logically therefrom.  I don’t have health insurance.  And if I were to get smushed by a barrelling-0ut-of-control Molson delivery, Canada would end up paying for it.  End of story.

I was, and am, embarrassed.  I was embarrassed, specifically, and most superficially, because both my dad and my arch-conservative friend Russ had cajoled me in the weeks leading up to the trip to get some kind of insurance.  I felt that $450-ish/month ($565 with dental) to continue my insurance from Overlake via COBRA was too expensive.  And I felt that independent policies are valueless.  You pay for them when you don’t need them, and when you do, they wriggle away on pre-existing conditions, retroactive fine print, et al.  I decided I was better off taking my chances with the ER and bankruptcy.

But I was also embarrassed more deeply because here I was having to explain to Canadians, people who do not fret about whether or not they are insured, that I do not have insurance.  I am one of that minority of Americans who by their own shiftlessness, their own decision, bad luck, or bad circumstance does not have insurance.  And it was about to put the kibosh on my plans to trek through Canada.

And so I rode back from the border toward Oroville, tears welling in my eyes.  I had been advised by the U.S. border guard that I would have to go to Wenatchee to find a travel agency in order to get travel insurance.  I was already re-tooling my journey in my head to follow the Northern Tier Route and stay in the United States.

But I went to the library in Oroville, and found some cheap travelers insurance US$135 which would allegedly cover me up to $1,000,000 (as long as I was in Canada, no good in the U.S.) with no deductible (a surprise bonus) until the end of October.

I suspect it is completely valueless.  But I scrambled over to the aforementioned Windemere, and bought that policy, and printed it up, and printed up my bank statements too.  The people in the real estate office were really supportive.  You could tell, whatever their stance on healthcare in our country, that they were gauled that this was preventing me from getting into Canada.

I went back to that border guard.  I showed her my “Certificate of Insurance” (I could have made this in a flash in Publisher, but, again, I’m basically honest), and the withdrawl from my bank account paying for it, and my bank statements to show I had enough money to travel.  (This was still a little dicey.  She wanted me to have $120 per day for each day I was going to be in Canada…which was about three times my budget.  I had to plead that this was really way too much as I was camping and cooking my own food.)

Ultimately, after being questioned by multiple different border officials, warned multiple times not to work, or settle down, or educate myself in Canada, I was given a handsome certificate allowing me to visit Canada until October 15th.  Welcome to Canada  I must remit the certificate before my egress or I will be placed on a list of wanted persons.

Canadian Immigration Certificate

Penultimately, I was given a private little apology and a thank you for my patience by the guard who actually signed the certificate.  The only indication that anyone there, besides myself, thought this was hooey.

Here’s the thing:

I’m wistful for a simpler time between the U.S. and Canada.  Before we needed passports, enhanced IDs, and proof of health insurance to cross one way or another.  Is this really making us safer?  Does this bode well for future efficient border crossing, commerce, and amity?

But here’s the other thing:

Let’s get some damn national healthcare.

I don’t know where this stands right now.  I didn’t even know Ted Kennedy was dead until several days after the fact.  And so it wouldn’t surprise me if the no-healthcare-boat has already left port.  But if it has, well, it will come back to bite us eventually, as more become uninsured, as costs continue to rise, as service continues to decrease, etc.

My thought is this:  If clean water were only available through your employer, would you be afraid to leave your job?  I’d say, yes, you would be afraid.  And while healthcare doesn’t rise to the same basic level of necessity as water, it is close.

While I’d like to think that we’d be more productive if everyone in our country were guaranteed healthcare (we’d spend less as a whole on the stuff, our businesses would be more competitive with places that already have national healthcare, people would be more willing to take crazy risks on new, innovative business ventures because they wouldn’t be terrified of being stuck out there without any coverage), we may not be more productive in any of these ways.  And I don’t care to hang my hat on those particular facts.

Rather, I say, that access to basic, affordable healthcare is not only smart for the national bottomline (I parrot, many other countries do it cheaper with better tangible results), but that it is a basic expectation of a modern, semi-industrialized government.  This is part of the social contract.  We agree to be governed by these institutions.  You agree to provide a baseline of national defense, of justice, of law enforcement, of order, of regulation, of sanitation, and, yes, of healthcare.

Some sort of government option seems best here, only because it heightens competition for the private entitites, and because it has provided the best cost reductions in other countries.  But, unlike the free-marketeers, I’m not dogmatic.  I don’t mind if we go to the German system with all private insurers and strong regulations describing the coverage and costs provided by those insurers.  I’m also not dogmatic in that if whatever proposed solution doesn’t work, I say, try something else.  If the results are bad or expensive (as they are now), try something else.  And if that doesn’t work.  Tweak it.  Try again.

In front of Tourist Information Centre in Osoyoos, BC

And please, don’t leave me embarrassed by my citizenship at any border ever again.