I’m a Canadian, and my father is Caymanian. A few years ago we were having a conversation over Skype and he told me his new job wouldn’t allow him to begin until he had a physical. Knowing our healthcare I was distressed and shouted, “That’ll take months!”
He responded, “No, I just walked into the hospital that afternoon, and they had it finished on the spot”.
There’s one thing you learn about in the Canadian education system, it’s that our healthcare system is better than America’s. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation actually uses taxpayer dollars to fund advertisements to talk about the miracle of our socialized system.
It’s unthinkable to some Canadians that our healthcare system is failing, and yet it measurably is failing. Wait times for surgery are objectively much higher in Canada than in more privatized systems. The Health Council of Canada commissioned a study that found 43% of Canadians waited over four weeks to see a specialist, compared to only 10% in the U.S.
After the failure of the Affordable Care Act in the U.S. many Americans are now turning to alternative solutions to the financial nightmare of their system. Bernie Sanders has been calling for universal health care for years now. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been going on a public speaking tour demanding action moving America to a socialized system.
I can’t help but wonder if these people ever took a loved one, as I once did – the sweetest lady I ever met, to the emergency room after breaking her hip, and watched her in agony, tied to a stretcher in a dark and noisy hallway all night, waiting for overworked staff to free up a bed. I can’t help but wonder if they’ve called for an ambulance only to get an answering machine.
Canadians are hearing whispers and second-hand stories of healthcare elsewhere. We’re hearing stories that after a major surgery many Americans don’t have to share a room with 4-8 other people, and can get a good night’s rest.
The American system is a broken system. The U.S. government, due to its involvement, have so skewed the lines of supply and demand that they have driven up the costs to healthcare immensely. At this juncture, there is no conceivable way for Americans to afford a national system as when Canada nationalized, we had not yet inflated our healthcare costs to the degree America has with its government involvement.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously quipped in her recently 60 minutes interview that, “There’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
The path to truth is reason. Applying reason to morals is what the philosophers call ethics. If one wishes to be ethical one must first have their facts in order.
I don’t have a solution for American healthcare, I know there’s a present financial crisis. If there is a solution to be had, let my first advice be to the American people that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is fundamentally wrong; it’s important to get facts right, especially the fact of Canada’s healthcare being in good condition.
Brandon Kirby
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