Health Care System Frustrations

I don't know what its like in your part of the world but here in Nova Scotia our health care system is overworked, underfunded and understaffed. I recently spoke with another person who has been waiting over 900 days to see a knee specialist. I understand his frustration at our system as I was in his shoes just last year. If my mother hadn't stepped up and gave me the hundreds of dollars to have a private MRI done I would have been walking around with a cracked kneecap and severe osteoarthritis in my knee without knowing why it hurt (the crack was through my kneecap, so there wasn't some big long crack on the surface to see on an xray, although when you look at the bone on an MRI you see the crack went all the way through the kneecap without totally splitting it in two).
As it was, even when I got a diagnosis it didn't mean I got help. I was told the typical line to do physio and if that fails to get an injection. No cast or splint was put on my knee, I was told to take it easy and use crutches, which I had to pay for myself. After that they threw up their hands. My GP had me try a chiropractor, which helped for a while, but never really got rid of my pain. As some sort of last resort and in an angry huff my last OA doctor told me my pain was in my head and I should take a nerve pill. Well we all know how badly that went.
When speaking with this other person we discussed how many times we had both been to the ER because of our pain. Personally, in the past year, I've been checked three times for DVT and four times for broken bones. Each and every time I walk out of the ER feeling like I wasted my time since no one can tell me why I'm in pain. My new OA doctor says its all part of having OA but everything I read says where I have pain is NOT where I have knee OA. It doesn't matter, no one thinks it merits any further testing or investigation. It is truly no mystery to me why some people will drop dead because of some "unforeseen medical issue" that they were probably told multiple times "is nothing" by an ER doctor and sent home. After visiting the ER at least 5 times in the past year I've given up on my provincial medical system since they only want to either give me pills to shut me up or tell me my pain is in my head. So as I sit for the third day in a row with this crazy pain on the opposite side of my bad knee, I just hope it isn't DVT or some ligament tear. No point in getting it checked out since they will just say they can't find anything wrong.
So is this what our medical system has come to? Patients that are living in daily pain without any sort of help? Patients being told that because we're too young we can't get a knee replacement because they would have to do another in 20 years. So apparently we are all supposed to live in pain for 20 years before we get to spend our geriatric years undergoing surgery? What kind of sense does that make? Because our province doesn't want to spend the money and time on a possible cure for some patients they will spend the money on god-knows how many ER visits, pills and diagnostic tests. Lunacy. I see why a lot of people travel to the US where they will actually try to fix your health issue, for a price.