https://www.newsmax.com/sallypipes/healthcare-canada/2021/08/05/id/1031237/
Demonstrators in 50 cities across the country took the streets last month to demand a government takeover of America’s health system.
The Democrats who control Washington are trying to give those activists what they’re asking for, albeit in piecemeal fashion.
In recent weeks, they’ve proposed lowering Medicare’s eligibility age and adding dental, vision and hearing benefits to the entitlement. Democrats in Congress have also offered a plan to provide federally funded health coverage to low-income people in the 12 states that have yet to adopt Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
This drive to put the government in charge of an ever-greater share of our healthcare system is misguided. For evidence, look no further than Canada, the country where I grew up and started my career.
Our northern neighbor’s government-run health insurance scheme saddles patients with long waits for low-quality care — when it doesn’t ration care outright.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, long delays for treatment were a fact of life for Canadians. In 2019, the median wait time for specialist care following referral from a general practitioner was nearly 21 weeks, according to the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver think tank.
In 2020 — a year in which more than 1.2 million Canadians were waiting for care — the median wait for specialist care grew to 22.6 weeks. In 1993, the median wait was 9.3 weeks.
These long waits are costing lives. Between April 2019 and December 2020, more than 10,000 patients died while waiting for a specialist appointment, a procedure, a diagnostic test or a surgery, according to a recent report from the Canadian think tank SecondStreet.org. Given the dearth of government data, it’s likely that the death toll is higher still.
And there’s no way around the waits. Canada bars private health insurance for anything deemed “medically necessary” by the government. So people who want or need timelier care effectively have to leave the country.
Canadians pay dearly to wait in line. The country’s single-payer system is far from free. Fraser estimates that the average Canadian family of four pays more than C$14,400 (US$11,545) in taxes for their shoddy public insurance coverage.