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sc94597 on 29 March 2017
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Rab said:
NightDragon83 said:
Try adding 10x the current number of people to the Canadian health care system of all kinds of different economic and cultural backgrounds and then see how well it fares. That's basically what would happen if you tried to replicate the Canadian health care system in the US.

I'm not sure I undertand your reasoning, wouldnt Canada's health system be scalable ?

 

In 2006, per-capita spending for health care in Canada was US$3,678; in the U.S. it's US$6,714. The U.S. spent 15.3% of GDP on healthcare in that year; Canada spent only 10.0%

The US is spending far more per-capita and has the resources, just look at the military budget, but the US still gets worse health outcomes  

The argument is that there is a diseconomies of scale in providing for 320 million people versus a few million (Canada's single-payer is funded on the provincial level.) If this weren't the case, then Canada would have a national system, which it does not. Americans spend more on healthcare because they demand luxury care (amazing ly comfortable hospitals; end of life care ; etc.) Single-payer systems don't provide this, and it is hard to imagine a national single-payer system which would provide all of the various drugs and benefits needed in the same way that competing insurance companies would. Multi payer in the vein of Switzerland or the Netherlands seems like the way to go.