For the large majority of Canadian residents there is nothing technically stopping them from traveling to the US for healthcare, paid out of pocket. Some people do that, in some situations, particularly for those who live just north of the border, but it's uncommon. Some reasons:
- From the experience of people I know who have needed urgent care (heart attack, cancer, anorexia, broken bones, etc), my Ontario provincial health system works pretty well, and was often excellent. The people I know received timely, high quality treatment (despite all the bad press in the news these days), at zero out of pocket cost.
- The areas that Canadian healthcare is most falling behind on are (a) access to primary care, and (b) treatment of serious things that probably won't kill you (e.g. joint replacements, cataract surgery). For (a) few people are going to travel to the US to see a family doctor. For (b) this is mostly seniors, who usually decide to grind through another 6 months on the hip replacement wait list rather than pay US$50k today.
- US healthcare is very expensive if you're paying list price. Waiting longer and getting free care in Canada often looks pretty good by comparison. Any reimbursement from your provincial health insurance will be a small fraction of the total US bill. Maybe you could save a month on getting treatment for your cancer or whatever, but is that month worth US$100k or whatever out of your family's life savings? Most people decide "no".
- Where will you live in the US while receiving treatment (e.g. for cancer)? Will your job allow you to be away? The cost of travel and lodgings adds to the cost of the already expensive healthcare. And if you feel crummy (e.g. because you have cancer and you're on chemo) you don't want to have to go through airports and live in hotel rooms, you want to be in your home.
- If despite all the above you decide to be a medical tourist, why would you choose the US? Once you're hopping on a plane and paying cash, there are often better countries in the world. I have heard of people going to Mexico, Lebanon, and India for treatment, and much lower cost than the US, while still getting high levels of care.
The notarization process is super painful, no doubt. I had originally written shell scripts to automate the process for my company, but recently switched to the excellent command line tool 'xcnotary' (https://github.com/akeru-inc/xcnotary). it's available through Homebrew.
Java is not commonly used for consumer desktop applications, where it often is necessary/desirable to invest in fully native apps for Windows and MacOS. But desktop Java is quite common in business desktop applications, for example, medical devices (like radiology image viewers).