{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Craig Left Quebec in the 1970s, When a Driver's License Ran $300 and Registering the Family Wagon Ran $3,000","description":"Craig grew up in Canada and left in the 1970s, and this week he put numbers on why. A driver's license in Quebec cost $300 a year. Registration on the family station wagon cost $3,000 a year. Both figures in 1970s dollars. Auto insurance, by contrast, was free \u2014 which Craig turned into the sharpest point of the segment: his father remarried, his stepmother got her license at 26, and she totaled three cars. Craig's question was not about her driving. It was about what happens to the premium. "How much does insurance go up? How much is the risk? Zero, of course, because there is no insurance. So what's her incentive to not hit the next telephone pole?" Most of the segment was Craig's family and Canadian health care, told as first-hand stories rather than argument. His father had a heart attack in Toronto and rode in the back of an ambulance from hospital to hospital looking for one not too busy to take a heart attack; when he was finally admitted, the treatment was an overnight stay, an aspirin, and instructions to call if it happened again. His brother cut a finger off with a cable saw and made the same circuit of Toronto hospitals, holding the severed finger. Craig said the average wait for an MRI or CT scan in Canada now exceeds the life expectancy of some of the people waiting, and that doctors resigning over the workload made the front page of the Toronto papers the same week. Jeff's contribution was the mirror image: the MRI and CT businesses in Rochester, Buffalo, Vermont and Montana whose customers are almost entirely Canadians who drove south. The turn Craig kept coming back to is that none of this changes anyone's mind, including his own family's. Ask his mother and she will tell you the Canadian system is the best in the world \u2014 and then hand him her U.S. travel insurance number in case she gets sick while visiting. Jeff's framing was generational: his oldest son, a Stanford graduate, argues the Nordic-and-Canada version of the case, and Jeff's view is that the people who need to hear the counterargument are the ones who never lived under it. Also in this segment: Craig's visit to his mother in Montreal over Labor Day weekend, and the reception he got from a brother-in-law over U.S.\u2013Canada trade and Nexus cards Canadians who have stopped crossing the border entirely \u2014 no more Lake George, no more grocery runs to Target and Walmart \u2014 and the "buy Canadian" signage with the maple leaf that has gone up in the grocery stores Jeff's standing request for the next trip south: a couple of pounds of smoked meat from Schwartz's, and as many bags of ketchup chips as Craig can smuggle into Vermont. President's Choice. "Cheapy, but good." No newsletter that week \u2014 Labor Day and the trip north \u2014 but Craig confirmed it returns the following week Free newsletter and Insider Session announcements: CraigPeterson.com ","author_name":"Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity","author_url":"https:\/\/cptt.libsyn.com\/podcast","html":"