Canadians won’t claim that their system is perfect – they know better. But the typical working class Canadian gets much better health care at a much lower overall cost than the typical working American.

The U.S. has the most expensive health care system in the world, in raw dollars or in per capita dollars, yet leaves about 47 million people uninsured and probably at least as many underinsured. Yet the claim is made that the socialized systems are ineffecient and wasteful? Why not punctuate your posts with “Darn that pesky evidence, I’ll believe what I want to!”

How would you mandate that everyone has to have health insurance, Chris?

We all agree that an ideal health care system should cover everyone? Is that right?

You can look at the NHS’s own stats on their website. Bear in mind, when looking at their waiting times, you are seeing their rosy scenario, you are seeing the waiting time to see the specialist, not counting the time waiting to see the GP, and not counting the all-too-frequent cancellations for emergencies there.

There was a paper a while back, in the BMJ as I recall, comparing Kaiser favorably to the NHS. Kaiser does better, more responsive care, at lower cost than the NHS.

Of course, in the UK, the better off are “more equal” as Orwell would have said. They go private and get their specialty care quickly. As, for that matter, do the well-to-do in the socialized system as well. They call it “discrimination by postal code”. The poorer get worse health care and have worse outcome. The rich have better facilities locally, due to better clout and influence in the system. Somehow in the UK, that’s due to inherent inequalities in economics, and in the USA, that’s a result of our evil health care system.

Your argument is that it is far better for those with insurance to have access to specialty care at the cost of no coverage at all for 43 million people then it is to allow any waiting time for specialty care for everyone.

Odd, my patients in HMOs have an average of 2 months between when I refer them and when they see a specialist.

So my patients in an HMO have the worst aspects of what you claim are the Canadian system’s and to make matters worse my patients who don’t have an HMO can’t see a specialist at all … ever.

How does this “meet the health needs of the community?”

I’m not endorsing single-payer Canadian system here. I am saying it’s ethically untenable to allow a system that doesn’t cover all Americans.

SPECIALTY care is where the rubber meets the road.

That is where you start to see the deficiencies. Yes, that Canadian resident will see the primary doc the same day for her sniffles.

And since most people have either no health care issues or minor issues, most people will be “satisfied” with medical care under those systems.

Let that same Canadian (or Brit, etc.) develop a major illness, cancer, heart disease, etc…….then see how long she waits.

Since few people have major health care needs at any time, there are few people complaining about this at any time, hence “more people are satisfied” with those systems.