Well, I'm no expert, but these points come up every time we approach an election as well (we just had one in Ontario). Here are my responses, based only on my own experiences with the health care system:
1) The Health Care Premium is a deductible expense that you do not have to pay if you live below the poverty line. For those who live above a certain tax bracket, it is returned on the following year's income tax if you have not required treatment. It is also a PROVINCIAL premium, and not related to the federal health care system. In fact, there is a calculation on your income tax form, based on household income. I've never had to pay it.
You should feel good about living in a country where the poor aren't forced to pay a premium they can't afford.
2) The system is very specific as to the types of treatments available. For example, I can receive up to forty sessions of physiotherapy for an injury or illness requiring that support. I can't get chiropractic, vision or dental assistance. There are limitations of followup and referral services, only because there are cases where people may abuse these treatments. There are in many cases lengthy waiting lists for surgeries...this has to do with staffing and space, not with the amount of money in the system. In every province, a travel grant is available if your surgery or specialized treatment requires immediate attention, so you can travel to another center to receive that treatment if there's no one available in your city. This includes travel and the cost of treatment in the US if necessary.
3) If this is what your doctor is doing, you can request an investigation from Health Canada. However, the idea that doctors prescribe drugs to move patient turnover faster isn't exclusive to Canada. US private clinics do this too. The difference is, in Canada you can't be refused treatment at a clinic or hospital if you lack private health coverage.
4) True, many Canadians don't have a family doctor. There aren't enough doctors to go around, and many are already overworked. This again is a staffing problem that both Health Canada and the provincial ministries are trying desperately to resolve. It's a question of funding vs. available staff. More money is currently being spent on training facilities, with incentives being added to help keep new graduate doctors in remote communities for longer periods, ensuring better personel coverage.
5) Emergency room waits are also a problem, especially in smaller communities. They have to prioritize. Obviously if you have a broken arm you can stand to wait a bit longer than someone who's pouring out buckets of blood from a chest wound or teetering on cardiac arrest.
6) I don't know where this happened. I've never paid for any medical appliance supplied by a hospital, and I've never heard of anyone paying for a splint, and I've never paid a dime for any followup visit, either at the hospital or to any attending physician or surgeon. Not ever.
7) There are always stories about cardiac patients being put on waiting lists. Some areas don't have cardiac units, while those that do are overtaxed by the influx of patients from other areas. My own grandmother went on a waiting list for congestive heart failure, and ended up becoming quite weak as a result of being bumped several times from the unit in another city. She survived, but it's not the best system it could be. Alternatively, the care she got in our local hospital was excellent, and she didn't pay a cent for her room, food, treatment, or medication while she was in the hospital.
8) I don't know how many operations you need to have in a year, but again I've never heard of anyone being strung out because they'd outlived their assigned annual operation quota. A few people I know have had multiple operations without any issues, but there's always at least two or three months of recovery time between operations anyway. Plus, you don't pay for them.
9) Is there a country anywhere in the world where the government says exactly what they're doing? Where the Canadian government is throwing money is into incentives for new doctors coming out of our medical schools to stay in Canada. The attraction to other countries where they can work privately and charge whatever they want is pretty big, so the government is working to keep those doctors here to meet the demand.
10) This isn't true. If you have a disease, it gets treated. If you have an injury, it gets treated. There was some talk among the conservative wing of the government to restrict treatments for people who do things to themselves, but as it stands right now you cannot be denied treatment on the basis of lifestyle choices. You can, however, be denied a private health plan.
11) You have the right to get a second opinion. You just need the guts to ask. My wife and I do it all the time.
12) Again, you won't be denied treatment. Multiple operations beyond annual alotments are extremely rare, because you're expected to spend some time recouperating between surgeries.
13) They're immigrants. That means they're citizens. That means they're covered. They will pay taxes too, and in 10-20 years they'll also probably complain about having to pay for immigrants. Immigrants are just a good excuse for people to complain about the blatantly obvious drawbacks to any publicly funded system. Immigrants can also get library cards and driver's licenses, and their kids get to go to school...but nobody complains about that.
14) Yeah, I don't buy the needle exchange program myself. The only advantage it's had is that the amount your tax dollars pay for AIDS treatments among IV drug users has gone down, because clean needles slow the spread of HIV among that group. If they didn't provide clean needles, you'd be complaining about providing them with free medicine and hospital treatments for AIDS, which costs a lot more than needles. However, diabetics should at least be subsidized for these supplies.