Matthew

He doesn't have any beliefs.

Your number was just about uninsured people (using 20 year old data btw). Did not include denial of treatment for the insured, or lack of access for the insured due to cost. Unless you can surmount this mental hurdle in comprehending the issue, your just spinning your wheels. Not relevant to the issue at hand.

Wrong, not affording care is a much larger percentage of people in the US even among those who do have insurance. They never even reach the point of waiting. You're thinking that people in the US get medical treatment but then are just hit with big bills afterward that they can't pay. The reality is that if your treatment has a 20% copay and you can't pay it, your treatment isn't happening. If your insurance denies coverage, it's not happening. Or if you can't pay the $5000 deductable, then the next time you show up to the doctor they will just turn you away. These are people with health insurance. This is the reason that over half of ALL healthcare in the US happens in emergecy rooms.

Sure, therefore if you have insurance (americans) but die because you can't get treatment (americans) then you're no better off than those who die without insurance (americans). I'm just waiting for you to catch up. Yup, so then you must also agree that americans who have insurance but they can't use it for the medical care they need are in exactly the same boat as americans who need medical care but don't have insurance. I believe in you buddy, you can do this.

You admit that having insurance without access to care is the same as not having insurance at all--the reality for many Americans. Yet you insist on trying to compare Canadian deaths from wait times vs US deaths from not purchasing heath insurance as if those are the only Americans without access to healthcare.

Good question. Your comparison assumes that having insurance = having access to healthcare. Everyone having insurance but limited access to timely procedures includes almost everyone in canada. But in the US, "not having insurance" is only one extremely narrow set of people out of the much larger population that does not have access to the care they need, even for those who do pay for health insurance. For example those who can't afford the co-pays, deductables, or pharmaceuticals required. Also those who have insurance but are straight up denied coverage for a test, procedure, or medication that their doctor says they need. Also none of what you said discounts the relevance of canada doing what few countries have ever achieved--broadly shared good health outcomes. If access to medical care was actually as dire as you're saying, poorer and lower middle class people wouldn't be living so long.

Nope, try again. Wait time isn't the same as not having insurance. Comparing those two numbers doesn't mean anything. Obviously not meaningless, but yeah many variables. That's why the study cited in #4 is useful. It compares socioeconomic status and life expectancy. Not many things would explain the relative equity in canadian cities between rich and poor people's life expectancy beyond the realm of health policy.

Alright, a few things: 1. Both of these numbers you've provided are claims by advocacy group, so of course any "study" they publish is probably not an actual peer reviewed scientific study. 2. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that these numbers are correct, they are still comparing two completely different things: people who died while waiting for a medical procedure vs people who died due to lack of insurance. These aren't comperable and for the US it leaves out a lot of people. People with severe illnesses die in the US while scheduled for an upcoming scan or operation too. There are also people who simply don't seek medical care due huge to costs even if they are insured. Also in both canada and the US doctors can decide that you're too old or too sick to have an operation. The Canadians in this boat are certainly among those "waiting" while in the US they are simply denied and just have to wait for death. 3. If you want an indisputable cold hard statistic, the easiest one is life expectancy. Canadians live several years longer. 4. One way to know this is heavily connected to healthcare access is that Canadian life expectancy has far less of a gap between rich and poor compared to the massice gap between rich and poor life expectancy in the US (source).

What would you say a routine dental visit costs in Canada? Or something bigger like a crown?

A far bigger problem in the US.

You wouldn't have much of a choice. Families like mine who pay for health insurance give more to that one company in a year than they do to the federal, state, local government in taxes. Lol then why tf are you repeatedly writing lengthy commentary in response to statements about what I spend? You started off strong in this thread. But after the quality of someone's replies drops to insults and pointless pissing contest banter I stop reading most of what they write, so I never saw a question, nor am I interested at this point in any bad faith questions you have. You're no longer actually engaging in discussion.

Given that your country spends so little on healthcare, your minor problems with wait times are understandable. If you dont like it, you society should just spend more on it.

I love how you think it's utterly impossible for me to even make a rough estimate of canadian taxes. Yet you also you think you know more about what i spend on healthcare in the US.

No it was a law passed by democrats and signed by Biden. But it wouldn't surprise me if republicans had floated a similar idea under trump. The price of insulin was so obviously exploititive.

I buy insulin for my cat. My cat has no health insurance and is not on Medicare part D and uses the same insulin humans do. A standard wee 20ml vial went from over $300 to $35 at every pharmacy in town regardless of the brand/manufacturer.

That's so far off the mark. Btw when i was tallying up my fairly typical $24,000 USD health insurance cost, I wasnt even including the thousands of dollars in Medicare and Medicaid taxes I also pay toward the tens of millions of people who do get free government Healthcare in the US.

I'm 100% sure that swifties would find this worse than attempting to overturn an election.

As far as I can tell it's working just fine with insulin. The production costs fluctuates between $2-10, so right now $35 is plenty to still make a profit. For such a big health necessity the government and the industry itself can monitor for recommending when updating the price ceiling is necessary.

I think price controls can nice for certain major essential items when they factor in a fair about of profit for suppliers in a market which is able to fluctuate with the price of inputs. Good recent example is insulin. Last year a single vial was typically $300-400 even though that vial only costs a few dollars to produce. A bipartisan bill put a $35 price cap and doing so has had no impact on the availability of insulin.

As we all digress here in this fascinating comparison of the US and Canadian health systems, keep in mind I'm also still waiting for ANY insights on details of the Republican Party's long term designs for healthcare which they have become very quite about during this election cycle.

I'm not talking about any comparison in this point. You're trying to tell me what the actual amount americans spend on healthcare. I'm saying what i myself spent on healthcare last year. I'm not sure what you're whining about with this fact. Why is that suddenly a threshold that matters? What does Canada's system have that is worse than millions of people not having any access to healthcare? Your previous comment is based on some fairytale version of private healthcare filled with choices and that by not having taxes taken out for health services, like the miserable surfs of Canada, she's thus free to spend her own money. The reality is that people have very few choices they can make and the system is very much engineered for the purpose of extracting profits Again, fairytale. Most insured people buy insurance through their employer. An insurance company has a deal with your workplace and sells a plan from a set of group rate packages to choose from. You can only realy go with this one company because within each region of the US there are only one or two insurance companies who have negotiated pricing agreements with the local health provider networks of that region (and the one your employer picks will have some empoyer contributions that make it worthwhile compared to the go it alone route). If you try to go with no insurance and just save up a cash fund like smartass, you'll have to pay the ramped up sticker price, so like $300 for an annual physical or $50,000 for an emergency appendectomy. Insurance doesn't actually pay these amounts, they have negotiated lower prices.

Exactly

I don't give two shits about a per capita average that americans pay. Im looking directly at what i literally paid last year. The reason per capita is useless is because only half of Americans like myself fully afford and pay for healthcare. Well that's a story that you'll hear in every country where a citizen has a right to healthcare and can actually get into the waiting room. The US equivalent scandalous story would be hospitals turning away dying ER patients or dumping indigent patients on skid row or people dying while waiting for an ambulance that never arrives. But again the real disparity are the millions of people who never even bother to go to a doctor. Made more money? Again she's in poverty working full time and lives paycheck to paycheck. In 5 years she'll qualify for Medicare and will get treated, if she can make it that long. Sounds like your system is just underfunded since you're paying so much less into it. Like you said, either you pay and get the good stuff, or you just get sick and die. Which one is canada doing?

This problem is even worse with privatized healthcare. By design, about 1/3 of your monthly overpriced premium is goes to shareholders, corporate bonuses, etc. There is no ethical rule about what the insurance company can or can't spend that money on. When governments use the money, it's big public scandal if a few million of it was used for some unsavory purpose--precisely because there are laws and public scrutiny, which naturally creates a perception of systemic malfeasance even if the institutions run pretty well. My dad was a hospital pharmacy manager for decades and even though he's a pro-trump republican conservative ultra-capitalism kind of guy, he has no faith in privatized medicine pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, etc.

I'm sure I left out some minor expenses on each side but even just going by your 45% stat shows I was probably pretty close That's a good point, looks like on average many Canadians spend a few thousand dollars a year on supplemental insurance. I still don't see how you're arriving at this. Even if we bump the taxes up to 45% of income and throw in $5000 of private supplemental insurance, it's still $15,000 per year more in the US than Canada for someone of my income level. Americans spend 17% of their GDP on healthcare compared to your 12% (and that's with a 27% higher GDP per capita) This happens in the US too. Keep in mind, even on my modest middle class income I'm paying a huge amount each month and only about half of Americans can afford such an absurd expense. 15 million people have no insurance at all and probably tens of millions have just the most basic catastrophic care insurance--or insurance that still requires thousands of tens of thousands of dollars deductible payment before the insurance will pay for anything. So the number of Americans dying due to having no access to any routine care or preventative care or a realistic way to pay for procedures is very high. My aunt is 60 years old, makes close to minimum wage as a nursing home aid. She's probably below the poverty line, can barely walk due to a lack of cartilage in her knee. She's certainly not in on any waiting list for a knee surgery because she would have no way to pay for such a procedure. 47% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and aren't well insured. Compared to the US, Canada's inconveniences with their underfunded system are small potatoes. And yeah I'm not suggesting that Canada has some great healthcare system. I'm not sure how it even came up--probably because of all the f-ing Canadians here.