Canadian Healthcare

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Canadian healthcare is fine, if you're in a major city (good political access), and you have something minor that you can live with while waiting your turn in line. If you have something serious, life threatending, odd, or don't want to wait, or want the best access? Then it sucks. For "Free" healthcare, the average Canadian family spent $12,000 in taxes to get this "free" healthcare -- and if they needed to see a specialist, they waited an AVERAGE of 21.2 weeks to receive treatment AFTER being referred by their general practitioner (and that wait). Complex medical issues had an average wait for 33 weeks, and orthopedic surgery was 41 weeks. Average. That means if you were an outlier, it could be much longer: one Ontario patient had to wait 4 1/2 years to see a neurologist. And that's before they get assigned diagnostic test, which is another line (11 weeks average for an MRI that you can get same day in the U.S.). 3% of all Canadians are in healthcare line at any given time. Delayed healthcare is rationed healthcare and costs lives: it turns minor maladies into chronic, irreversible, or even permanent disabilities. And in extreme cases, early death.


Truth or Progressivism?

I don't mind an honest debate if whether putting everyone into a rationing system where the politically connected get preferential treatment, or our system where the richer do is better. There are good arguments to be made either way. Their system does have some benefits, especially in the short term and for minor maladies -- and the cost of under-capacity and longer term decay of the system, and so on. We can talk about where the balances are in a hybrid system -- like if you can't pay for the full private system, could there be a hybrid fallback and so on. So I'm not a purist, I'm a realist. But you can't have any of these discussions with uninformed or polemic individuals that deny there's any costs/consequences of politician/bureaucrat run healthcare (which is what Single-payer systems like Canada are). If they can't admit the flaws like the ones I mentioned above, then they're not yet up for having an adult discussion, and should be mocked out of any serious debate on policy. (See most of the far left).

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