The Case for Medicare for All: Congress passes an inflation bill but is it enough?

Twelve month delay right now, in the UK, for ACL replacement. I spoke with an orthopedic surgeon in Nottingham yesterday. He says it's like that across the board. If he could move to America tomorrow he'd do it.

Works so well, Canadians routinely come to the USA for medical care. In England, you die waiting on a CT or MRI, woman are giving birth in ambulances because the hospital doesn't have a bed to put them in.

Want to see the quality of care implode here, institute Medicare for All.

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. The cost for some insulin medications are outrageous.

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Joe Biden "I did that giff"

The reason this will never work is due to the most simply economic principle there is: The Law of Supply and Demand.

A person, an individual, can be smart; but people, as a group, are dumb.

If something like healthcare becomes free due to subsidizing from government, demand for it rises well beyond supply.

That looks like long wait times for surgeries in Ontario.

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THE RAW NUMBERS IN FULL:
Number of patients who died while waiting for surgery:
2021-22: 1,417
2020-21: 1,096
2019-20: 986
2018-19: 1,039
2017-18: 1,138
2016-17: 1,045

Number of patients who died while waiting for a CT scan:
2021-22: 5,404
2020-21: 4,624
2019-20: 3,924
2018-19: 3,991
2017-18: 3,346
2016-17: 2,838

Number of patients who died while waiting for an MRI scan:
2021-22: 1,993
2020-21: 1,867
2019-20: 1,610
2018-19: 1,363
2017-18: 1,171
2016-17: 1,058

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To put this in perspective, in the United States, 70 percent of patients are able to be seen by specialists less than four weeks after a referral. In Canada, less than 40 percent were seen inside of four weeks.

and long wait times in being admitted to the hospital from the ER

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Wait times at several major Toronto hospitals are high — and trending upwards at some sites — as Ontario’s health-care system buckles under pressure.


July was marked across the province by emergency room closures driven by staff shortages — particularly among nurses.

The Ontario Nurses’ Association (ONA) recently said it was “outraged about the severe nursing and health-care staffing shortages that are plaguing hospitals.”

“The shortages are being reported in emergency departments, ICUs, medical units, surgery, and more.”

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Wait times to be admitted from the emergency room at St. Josheph’s Health Centre and St. Michael’s Hospital — both run by Unity Health — were 25 hours in May and 23.3 hours in June.

In May, the average wait time to be admitted at St. Joseph’s was 32.9 hours.

The target time for hospitals to admit patients from the emergency room is eight hours, according to Health Quality Ontario, part of Public Health Ontario.

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By contrast, the average wait time in the U.S. is around an hour and a half.

And, of course, ER wait times

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The average waiting time for patients in Canadian EDs (Emergency Departments) ranges from three to four hours (Hildebrandt, 2014). More preposterously, this “average” accounts for only a minority of the population. When asked up front, most patients claimed that they’d had to wait for at least five hours before consulting a physician.

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Meanwhile, the average wait time in the US is about 40 minutes.

Making the decision to move to a Medicare For All system is to advocate for overloading the system with demand, to the point where the Canadian wait times listed above look like a pleasant dream.

We already have Medicare/Medicaid for everyone that is of retirement age, too poor, too sick, or unwilling to work.

You guys are already paying for all of that with the current tax system. It boggles the mind that the lot of you can't figure out how much better it would be to NOT have an insurance company leach off of you and deny coverage all while you continue to support the people outlined above.