It’s simply not true that Canada’s health care costs less than $63 billion. The actual number is closing in on $400 billion ($372 billion for 2024).
And it also should be noted that there are severe problems with our health care system. Severe nursing shortages and very long wait times for a lot of critical care, long wait times to see specialists, etc.
Sorry, when someone says "more than it costs Canada to fund its universal healtcare", I guess we most commonly think in total, like years or something. So I find this unintentionally misleading
Not every person in the USA has insurance through United Health, but according to their own website, they "provide care" [sic] to 7.7 million Americans.
Our healthcare only has those problems after alot of cuts. When it used to cost more, it also used that money more efficiently and effectively. The cuts made it far worse than the respective amount of money "saved", redistributed to worse projects is more accurate.
Costs patients that money. Real countries with real healthcare aren't bankrupting the citizenry by extracting wealth for healthcare, that's 'Murica, LLC.
USian here. We have nursing shortages and long wait times as well, and the private equity fucks taking over our system are always looking for ways to make it worse for more money. One thing they've been pushing lately is trying to widen physician/patient ratios, so that doctors spend even less time with each patient.
And a lot of it is due to conservative meddling and wanting to privatize everything. Private clinics still receive public funding... and more of it than public hospitals! This is one reason why it is getting more fucked.
There’s way more to it than that. Health care in general just costs way more now than it used to. Everyone involved has to be paid more. There’s new equipment that costs millions of dollars and new drugs that cost thousands of dollars.
I asked my doctor about some drugs I saw being advertised on TV (while watching NFL broadcasts from the US) and he said a lot of these drugs aren’t available in Canada because they cost tens of thousands of dollars a month and our health care system simply refuses to pay for them.
Kind of, the main issue is that COVID led into boomers getting old and sick in one fell swoop. No healthcare system in the world is adequately to handle a pandemic and then aging boomer surge.
Nurses and doctors were asked to do more than they ever have before and many just retired early or quit so there are shortages everywhere.
The for profit aspect in the US just magnifies the issue locally.