A friend of mine from Canada messaged me this past week to tell me about her trip to the United States to get surgery. She had to pay tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket herself to get treated. Although she had probably paid tens of thousands of dollars into the Canadian single payer system, when she asked THEM for care, they told her it would be about 2 years before she could get treated.

Here’s a related story from the Globe and Mail, which is the more leftist of Canada’s two national newspapers:

Half of the children in Canada who need surgery are facing waiting times that far exceed clinical recommendations for treatment, a situation experts say could have serious, lifelong consequences for young patients’ development.

The waiting-time numbers, collected from children’s hospitals across the country by the Pediatric Surgical Chiefs of Canada, highlight the immense strain pediatric facilities are under. The burden has also led to overcrowded hospitals, record emergency-room waits and delayed diagnosis and treatment of developmental conditions.

The problem with having a health care monopoly is that it eliminates the need for health care providers to compete with each other to reduce costs and improve quality. In every monopoly, the providers have no reason to innovate, so they don’t. And if you don’t like it, you can take whatever money you have left from taxes and go to another country.

This is horrifying:

Pediatric surgeries are performed in order of how urgent they are, but even urgent procedures are being delayed beyond the recommended windows of time. Pediatric orthopedic surgeries are among the procedures most commonly subject to lengthy delays.

In an e-mailed statement, Ontario Health wrote that, as of Aug. 1, 55 per cent of those on the pediatric surgical waiting list had waited beyond the recommended timelines for their procedures.

Mr. Squires said the most recent Ontario data he has seen show that about 40 per cent of adult patients are waiting beyond the recommended timelines for surgeries.

Consider a 2021 report on wait times in Canada:

Specialist physicians surveyed report a median waiting time of 25.6 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment—longer than the wait of 22.6 weeks reported in 2020. This year’s wait time is the longest wait time recorded in this survey’s history and is 175% longer than in 1993, when it was just 9.3 weeks.

The waiting time for a referral to a general practitioner to a specialist increased from 10.5 weeks in 2020 to 11.1 weeks in 2021. And the waiting time from seeing a specialist to actually getting treatment  increased from 12.1 weeks in 2020 to 14.5 weeks in 2021.

Something to think about when the secular left tells you that they can improve healthcare by taxing you more, and having a government-run system. The Biden administration thinks that parents are “domestic terrorists” if they object to the education monopoly. They’ll think that you are a “domestic terrorist” if you object to the failures of their health care monopoly, too. Socialism always fails, and when it fails, the people who complain are blamed for the failure. Be careful what you vote for.