Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, on How to Pay for Medicare for All

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@Gary_Kumquat

Your system comes in at 29th worldwide*. Canada comes in 14th.
You spend over twice as much per capita on healthcare as Canada**

The U.S. would do a lot better on many of those rankings if they compared like to like: how well does a U.S. population adjusted to match Canada’s or other OECD countries in terms of race, income, etc. do healthwise compared to those countries. Still, we pay too much and it’s wrong to have millions uninsured. I should know, because I was one of the ranks of the uninsured for well over a decade. And then I rejoiced at the passage of Obamacare, but soon learned was not eligible because I fell into the “family glitch”. That was a rough day, a moment when my otherwise stalwart faith in President Obama was shaken: Hillary Clinton promises to make sure my kids and I get health care. Why won't Obama do the same?

@Gary_Kumquat

Or, you know, apocryphal story about how long your relatives have had to wait for a procedure, then some meaningless shite about decreeing costs, if you reckon that works as a persuasive argument.

“Meaningless shite” is in the eye of the beholder. “Apocryphal” is not: the story about my Canadian mother and sister is factually accurate and therefore not apocryphal. That doesn’t however make it more than an anecdote. So how about a cite or three?

Canada's medical wait times continue to creep up: Study

No, you’re not imagining things. It’s taking longer and longer — and longer — to get the medical care you need.
Waiting Your Turn, the Fraser Institute’s annual summary of treatment wait times in Canada, is out Tuesday, and the news is not good.
It begins, “Waiting for treatment has become a defining characteristic of Canadian health care,” and reports that the median wait for treatment across all provinces and some 12 medical specialties is now 19.8 weeks.

That’s down slightly from the 2017 median wait of 21.2 weeks, but don’t celebrate just yet. As the report specifies, that overall decline reflects decreases in wait times in some provinces — but masks the increases that took place in Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland & Labrador.
The median of 19.8 weeks of waiting around is a 136% increase over the 3.7 week wait of 1993, when the Fraser Institute first started keeping track.

And Ontario, which previously could claim the shortest median wait time, has now been bested by Saskatchewan; our median wait is 15.7 weeks, while Saskatchewan’s is 15.4.
The report breaks down waiting times by individual provinces and medical specialities, measuring from the time your family doctor refers you to a specialist through to completion of treatment.

In Ontario, waits were longest for orthopedic surgery (29.7 weeks) and ophthalmology (28.9 weeks) and shortest for medical oncology (3.2 weeks).

It takes longer for Canadians to get health care, but is it worth the wait? |...

Canadians also reported the longest wait times for specialists, with 56 per centwaiting longer than fourweeks to see a specialist, compared with the international average of 36 per cent.

One more:

How to solve Canada’s wait time problem

Canadians are fed up with long wait times for health-care services.
A new analysis from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) shows wait times for hip and knee replacements and also cataract surgeries have increased across Canada since 2015.
But we love our health care system. In particular, we take pride in the principle that care should be provided on the basis of need, rather than ability to pay.
[…]
The highly respected Commonwealth Fund has consistently ranked our system either ninth or 10th out of 11 peer countries for many years now.
On one issue in particular — wait times — we rank dead last.
The ‘wait time problem’
Nearly every Canadian family has a wait-time story. We wait in emergency departments. We wait to see family physicians. We wait for tests, procedures and surgeries. We wait to see specialists.

But those stories are all apocryphal, right? :dubious: (BTW, this story in particular matches perfectly with my sister and mother: they describe these insane wait times, I act appalled, they then defensively express a fierce pride in the Canadian health system overall, as I listen skeptically.)

And that idea that it’s all about need rather than ability to pay is not quite so either:

In the report, low-income Canadians said they had greater cost barriers to accessing care in general, an inequity Tepper called striking.
For instance, one in 10 Canadians didn’t fill a prescription orskipped a dose because of cost, according to the report. About 58 per cent of Canadians reported using one or more prescription drugs, compared with the international average of 52 per cent.
About one in four people 18 and older in this country reported skipping a dental visit because of the cost compared with one in five elsewhere

Look at my “apocryphal” sister, for example. She didn’t wait months to get her knee fixed: she did what any other middle class Canadian in her situation would do—go to the U.S. and pay out of pocket. (In case you’re wondering, she’s middle class because she and her husband are both veteran teachers, not because of any independent wealth.) So there’s a de facto situation of “poor people’s health care” when it comes to these kinds of surgery: poor people have to go on crutches for several months (probably exacerbating their poverty, making child care difficult, etc.), and middle class or wealthy people take care of it right away.

The upshot: We need to do better by our citizens and make access to health care universal. But we need to stop saying Canada is the model to follow. It is not. How about France instead?