Don’t have Canadian numbers, but making the most generous assumptions possible the US spends twice as much on administrative costs as a moderately well-run single-payer system:
It works.
Other countries (than the US) provide their citizens with equal or better health outcomes for the fraction of the cost of the US market-based system. That’s because we spend more than twice as much on administration.
The UK NHS costs about $8 billion a year to administer (and British MPs are constantly promising to cut administrative costs). In the US, wasted administrative healthcare spending alone is as much as $120 billion . The total cost is somewhere in the $300-$400 billion range (same link), depending on what you count as administrative costs.
I don’t know what the additional total cost of private voluntary/supplemental health insurance administration is in the UK. BUPA, which controls half of the market, has UK/North American revenues totaling $2.1 billion. We’ll pretend that every dollar of that was spent in the UK, and that BUPA’s UK administrative costs are the same as in Ireland (12% ). Taking 12% of $12 billion and doubling it, we get a very rough total cost of private health insurance administration for the entire UK of $0.5 billion. So, adding that to the NHS figure, we get an extremely conservative (ie., too high) total cost of UK health administration of $8.5 billion.
Multiply that by five, since the UK has one fifth the population, and we see that the cost of the UK NHS and supplemental private system is just over one seventh that of the US system on the low end and just over one tenth on the high end.
So, fuck the moral and philosophical arguments; our system sucks, and just about anything would be better.