All posts by Wintery Knight

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How is universal government-run healthcare working for Canada in 2024?

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I always get excited when the annual report on Canadian healthcare comes out. A lot of people in my office love single payer healthcare. Except they don’t know how it works in countries that have tried it. They imagine that it works well. They love the idea that healthcare will be free for them. But when I get my hands on a good study, it means a lot of fools are about to get a beat down.

Canada Universal Coverage Government Run Single Payer Healthcare Health Care Wait Times
Canada Universal Coverage Government Run Single Payer Healthcare Health Care Wait Times

Here’s the latest from the Fraser Institute:

  • In 2024, physicians across Canada reported a median wait time of 30.0 weeks between a referral from a GP and receipt of treatment. Up from 27.7 in 2023.

  • This is 222% longer than the 9.3 week wait Canadian patients could expect in 1993.

  • The national 30 week total wait is comprised of two segments. Referral by a GP to consultation with a specialist: 15.0 weeks. Consultation with a specialist to receipt of treatment: 15.0 weeks.

  • After seeing a specialist, Canadian patients waited 6.3 weeks longer than what physicians consider to be clinically reasonable (8.6 weeks).

  • Across 10 provinces, the study estimated that patients in Canada were waiting for 1.5 million procedures in 2024.

  • Patients also suffered considerable delays for diagnostic technology: 8.1 weeks for CT scans, 16.2 weeks for MRI scans, and 5.2 weeks for Ultrasound.

Well, there’s a saying in business. You can have a product or a service fast, or you can have it good, or you can have it cheap. Pick two out of 3. So, Maybe Canadian healthcare is not fast, but maybe it’s good, and maybe it’s cheap.

Canada Universal Coverage Government Run Single Payer Healthcare Health Care Cost Taxes
Canada Universal Coverage Government Run Single Payer Healthcare Health Care Cost Taxes

Let’s turn to the Fraser Institute again:

  • Canadians often misunderstand the true cost of our public health care system. This occurs partly because Canadians do not incur direct expenses for their use of health care, and partly because Canadians cannot readily determine the value of their contribution to public health care insurance.

  • In 2024, preliminary estimates suggest the average payment for public health care insurance ranges from $4,908 to $17,713 for six common Canadian family types, depending on the type of family.

  • Between 1997 and 2024, the cost of public health care insurance for the average Canadian family increased 2.2 times as fast as the cost of food, 1.7 times as fast as the average income, and 1.6 times as fast as the cost of shelter. It also increased much more rapidly than the cost of clothing, which has been falling in recent years.

OK, so Canadians aren’t getting healthcare fast, and they’re not getting healthcare cheap. Maybe they’re getting really really good healthcare, though.

Here are the numbers from a recent study from Ipsos, a major Canadian pollster:

An Ipsos survey for the Montreal Economic Institute is showing that Canadians’ opinions about their provincial healthcare systems have not improved in 2024 compared to last year. As in 2023, we find that less than half (48%) of Canadians are satisfied with their provincial healthcare system, with only 8% saying they are very satisfied. This proportion is even lower among women (43%), as well as residents of the Atlantic (30%).

Well, they are getting garbage healthcare. And they are not actually paying for healthcare. They are paying massive amounts of taxes for access to a waiting list for healthcare. And they get in line behind refugees who cannot even speak English, and have paid nothing in taxes. That’s what happens when you have universal-coverage government-run healthcare. That’s how it actually works in real life.

And sometimes they even die while waiting for healthcare. Here is an article from the Toronto Sun from January 2025:

Close to 15,500 people died waiting for health care in Canada between April 1, 2023 until March 31, 2024, according to data compiled by SecondStreet.org via Freedom to Information Act requests across the country.

However, SecondStreet.org says the exact number of 15,474 is incomplete as Quebec, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador don’t track the problem and Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia only provided data on patients who died while waiting for surgeries – not diagnostic scans.

SecondStreet.org says if it extrapolates the unknown data, then an estimated 28,077 patients died last year on health care waiting lists covering everything from cancer treatment and heart operations to cataract surgery and MRI scans.

I know that a some Americans like to pick political leaders and policies based on their feelings. They want to feel good. They want to be liked. People who like government-run healthcare tend to be people with enormous student loan balances for worthless non-STEM degrees. They work in easy jobs in the public sector. They join labor unions because they’re scared of competition and accountability. Many of them work in daycare or they teach little children, because they don’t want to be challenged by adults. When you look at the numbers on healthcare in different countries, it’s very clear what works and what doesn’t work. Americans need to be smarter than Canadians. We have to vote based on reason and evidence.

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The link between single mother welfare, fatherlessness, poverty and crime

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What is the root cause of criminal behavior? This article by feminist sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who points out the link between fatherlessness and crime in an article on the AEI web site.

Wilcox writes:

From Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., to Karl Pierson, who shot a teenage girl and killed himself this past Friday at Arapahoe High in Centennial, Colo., one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father. From shootings at MIT (i.e., theTsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s “list of U.S. school attacks” involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.

[…]The social scientific evidence about the connection between violence and broken homes could not be clearer. My own research suggests that boys living in single mother homes are almost twice as likely to end up delinquent compared to boys who enjoy good relationships with their father. Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has written that “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.” His views are echoed by the eminent criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, who have written that “such family measures as the percentage of the population divorced, the percentage of households headed by women, and the percentage of unattached individuals in the community are among the most powerful predictors of crime rates.”

Why is fatherlessness such a big deal for our boys (almost all of these incidents involve boys)? Putting the argument positively, sociologist David Popenoe notes that “fathers are important to their sons as role models. They are important for maintaining authority and discipline. And they are important in helping their sons to develop both self-control and feelings of empathy toward others, character traits that are found to be lacking in violent youth.” Boys, then, who did not grow up with an engaged, attentive, and firm father are more vulnerable to getting swept up in the Sturm und Drang of adolescence and young adulthood, and in the worst possible way.

So where do fatherless children come from? It turns out that government programs incentivize women to make them.

Dr. Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute explains how welfare causes fatherlessness in his testimony to Congress:

Welfare contributes to crime in several ways. First, children from single-parent families are more likely to become involved in criminal activity. According to one study, children raised in single-parent families are one-third more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior.(3) Moreover, O’Neill found that, holding other variables constant, black children from single- parent households are twice as likely to commit crimes as black children from a family where the father is present. Nearly 70 percent of juveniles in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes, as do 43 percent of prison inmates.(4) Research indicates a direct correlation between crime rates and the number of single-parent families in a neighborhood.(5)

As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted in her seminal article for The Atlantic Monthly:

The relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation’s mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime.(6)

At the same time, the evidence of a link between the availability of welfare and out-of-wedlock births is overwhelming. There have been 13 major studies of the relationship between the availability of welfare benefits and out-of-wedlock birth. Of these, 11 found a statistically significant correlation. Among the best of these studies is the work done by June O’Neill for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Holding constant a wide range of variables, including income, education, and urban vs. suburban setting, the study found that a 50 percent increase in the value of AFDC and foodstamp payments led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.(7) Likewise, research by Shelley Lundberg and Robert Plotnick of the University of Washington showed that an increase in welfare benefits of $200 per month per family increased the rate of out-of-wedlock births among teenagers by 150 percent.(8)

The same results can be seen from welfare systems in other countries. For example, a recent study of the impact of Canada’s social-welfare system on family structure concluded that “providing additional benefits to single parents encourages births of children to unwed women.”(9)

The secular left in this country believes that fathers need to be separated away from their children, and that’s why they support welfare programs that redirect money from husbands in intact families to single mothers. They believe that fathers are harmful because they set boundaries on children, and judge them and punish them when they act immorally. To the secular left, boundaries, judgments and punishments on children are bad, and must be stopped. So how can the secular left discourage men from marrying and teaching their own children morality? Well, they can tax married men, and they can give the money to single mothers.

Not only is crime caused by fatherlessness, but poverty is. as well.

Here is Dr. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation to explain:

Census data and the Fragile Families survey show that marriage can be extremely effective in reducing child poverty. But the positive effects of married fathers are not limited to income alone. Children raised by married parents have substantially better life outcomes compared to similar children raised in single-parent homes.

When compared to children in intact married homes, children raised by single parents are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, and use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent, and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; be expelled from school; and drop out of high school.[19] Many of these negative outcomes are associated with the higher poverty rates of single mothers. In many cases, however, the improvements in child well-being that are associated with marriage persist even after adjusting for differences in family income. This indicates that the father brings more to his home than just a paycheck.

The effect of married fathers on child outcomes can be quite pronounced. For example, examination of families with the same race and same parental education shows that, when compared to intact married families, children from single-parent homes are:

  • More than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime;[20]
  • Twice as likely to be treated for emotional and behavioral problems;[21]
  • Roughly twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school;[22] and
  • A third more likely to drop out before completing high school.[23]

The effects of being raised in a single-parent home continue into adulthood. Comparing families of the same race and similar incomes, children from broken and single-parent homes are three times more likely to end up in jail by the time they reach age 30 than are children raised in intact married families. [24] Compared to girls raised in similar married families, girls from single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to have a child without being married, thereby repeating the negative cycle for another generation.[25]

Finally, the decline of marriage generates poverty in future generations. Children living in single-parent homes are 50 percent more likely to experience poverty as adults when compared to children from intact married homes. This intergenerational poverty effect persists even after adjusting for the original differences in family income and poverty during childhood.[26]

People on the left claim that poverty causes crime, but they don’t look for the root cause of poverty. The root cause of poverty is the decline of marriage, which produces fatherless children.

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Abigail Shrier’s thoughts on Trump’s ban on taxpayer-funding of transing children

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Abigail Shrier wrote a popular book called “Irreversible Damage” where she talked about the movement to change a child’s appearance to the opposite sex with drugs and surgeries. Her goal was to convince voters that this caused “irreversible harm” to children. Now that president Trump has signed a ban on taxpayer-funding of transitioning children, she has excellent thoughts.

Here’s the article in the Free Press.

She starts like this:

When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our cells. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.”

How did it start? She has an answer:

It began with Obamacare.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

“Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class,” healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told me. And that opened a huge new source of funding for these treatments. “Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine,” Abbruzzese said.

If an insurer covers testosterone to treat a man who was deficient, then, according to gender ideology’s cracked logic, the insurer would also need to cover testosterone for a woman identifying as a man. If a procedure to remove a man’s unwanted breast tissue was covered, then a similar procedure for a woman identifying as a man must also be covered. Denying those claims could subject insurers to federal enforcement action.

Do you ever wonder why healthcare got so expensive after Obamacare was passed? It’s not just because Obama increased the number of mandatory coverages, and mandated coverage of more people. It’s the types of treatments that were now covered by health insurance companies. That’s why caused YOUR premiums to go up.

I like to get into fights with my doctor. He kept insisting that doctors who support pandemic mandates and transitioning children are driven by “evidence”, whereas opposition to these fads were based on “social media”.

But was he right? No, he’s wrong:

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an activist organization styled as a medical one, issued guidelines used as the “standards of care” by all major insurers and Medicaid to justify the provision of, and reimbursement for, gender transition services. WPATH represented their guidelines as evidence-based. Court-ordered discovery in a 2022 lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice to overturn Alabama’s ban on gender treatments for minors revealed that WPATH’s guidelines lacked solid evidentiary basis, but also that WPATH leadership knew it.

The organization suppressed publication of systematic reviews of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries undertaken by Johns Hopkins University. That research would almost certainly have revealed, as so many systematic reviews have now done, that while the risk of sterility, cardiac event, osteoporosis, and bone fracture were high, any alleged mental health benefits of the WPATH-approved puberty blockers-to-cross sex hormones protocol remained unproven.

But the Biden administration pressed onward, suing any state that enacted bans on medical transition for minors. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender adult, successfully pressured WPATH to drop minimum age requirements for gender medical treatments and surgeries in its September 2022 standards of care.

I blogged about this. And I guess that one of the reasons why Trump won is because people realized that the doctors were NOT operating on the basis of evidence at all. The doctors were being driven by the “big money” they were getting for drugging and mutilating these children. I blogged about that, too.

Back to Abigail. She talks about how the Obama and Biden regimes funded pro-trans research with taxpayer dollars. But they didn’t get the results they wanted:

The Obama and Biden administrations worked in tandem with activist organizations. Federal funds poured into tainted research. Gender physician Johanna Olson-Kennedy received nearly $10 million from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on gender-confused adolescents ages 11 and up. (She later lowered the age to 8.)

[…]As for her nine-year study on puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy didn’t like the results so, by her own admission, she shelved them. “She said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to the bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states,” according to The New York Times. She told the Times she intends to publish the data, but that getting her work to a place where it wouldn’t be “weaponized” required it to be “clear and concise. And that takes time.”

The public that had funded her research has never had the opportunity to review its results.

OK, that’s enough. You should read the whole article, it’s just first class. Evidence, evidence, evidence.

By the way, if you missed Matt Walsh’s opening monologue on Trump’s action, he shows why it’s actually better than you think.

If you are not listening to the Matt Walsh podcast, you should subscribe to it. Every opening monologue is worth a listen. We really need to return men to their rightful place as moral and spiritual leaders. We are not “servant leaders”, as Christian feminists like to argue. If we encouraged men to make moral judgments, and lead, then we would never have had transgenderism in the first place. And we need to train women to prefer men who judge and lead on moral and spiritual issues. It will be a 180-degree change from what we have now, but we need to do it.