Canada is spending $300 billion and 13% of its GDP on health care. But it's never enough.Canada’s socialized medicine is an expensive way to die. We are paying marginally more for a bankrupt system than Americans pay for private health care. As people in 12-step programs comprehend so well, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. .Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work out that way. We get the same result. As it is with Canada’s health care system. We keeping dumping taxpayer dollars into it — 25% of the federal budget — and we expect it to function as we wish. .But it doesn't.Because when you need it, medicare often isn't there for you or you have to leave the country for immediate or even proper care..Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is $196.1 billion over 10 years and $46.1 billion in new funding from the Canada Health Transfer to the provinces in order to prop up this dying entity. It’s said to be his “best offer” and Trudeau — mired in his own woke politics with more economic despair on the way — is surely banking on a healthcare deal to save his political skin. He might even call an election over it and point to Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s increasing reliance on for-profit clinics as evidence that federal Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada want to take us back to the stone age of private health-care. .But we are living in a healthcare stone age. .Canada’s health-care system is broken, imploding and can’t be resuscitated by ever more infusions of cash, even if we ludicrously call this spending an “investment.” .You may recall when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) required emergency heart surgery in October 2019. Even though Sanders calls himself an independent, he was running again for the Democratic presidential nomination on a far-left socialist platform that embraced “Medicare for All.” .Sanders was fond of extolling the supposed virtues of Canada’s single-payer system of medicare, calling it innovative and a health care model that Americans can aspire to. .It was and is a system replete with long wait times — for the simplest of procedures and for urgent operations. Under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) Sanders would have had to wait a minimum of seven days and a maximum of 28 days for an angioplasty operation — like the one he received in 2019. That 28 days is now a minimum for priority 4 cases, or those requiring "immediate" care.If you need an angioplasty — opening a blood vessel to the heart — you don't have 28 days to wait. In its annual review of Canadian health-care, the Fraser Institute reported the average wait time for all operations is almost 28 weeks. When you can't wait that long because you'll die, you can always leave the country for better treatment. In 2017, 217,500 Canadians did so, mostly traveling to the United States. .And don’t let anyone tell you medicare in Canada is free. It’s not. The Fraser Institute documented a family of four with a combined income of $156,086 could expect to pay $15,847 for public healthcare in 2022. .When you pay your taxes in the next few months, ask yourself if you are getting good value for the money you spend on health-care in Canada. .The average cost of private health in the United States is $560 per month per adult. For a family of four that cost rises to $1,437. .You do the arithmetic. We are paying marginally more in taxes for a bottom of the barrel heath care system in Canada. And the price of that system is bound to be going up with Trudeau’s latest proposal. Where do you think he’s going to get this “significant” increase in funding from? The magic lockbox? .Yet many Canadians are prepared to cling to their high taxes and outrageous wait times and are willing to travel to the U.S. when they know they will die otherwise, because they believe they're getting something for nothing and that any diminution of socialized medicine is somehow an attack on the fabric of Canada. .Well, you can believe this fable or you can demand some sanity. And that sanity includes private healthcare. .Think about the next time you are waiting for that surgery.
