All Canadians reading this thread are staring at their screens with a confused-dog-head-tilt.
It's incredible, the mental gymnastics some people will do to justify continuing to spend an astronomical amount of money on a crazy system.
For those worrying about universal healthcare being a slippery slope to heavy handed government social intervention. Um...have you forgotten what country you live in? Any party attempting to do that would be eviscerated by their opposition, and there would probably be a government shut down.
You have mechanisms in place, very very strong mechanisms at that, to prevent your own government from doing things like that. Oh my...just think of the negative ad campaigns. Wow.
I mean, come on! Even in Canada there was severe backlash against a soda tax. Actually, the left was even aggressively against it, labeling it as an attack on the poor. Our opposition parties do a great job riling the public up about any and every social policy that could possibly piss people off. That shit is political gold. (We picked that up from you guys, btw)
Also, Canadians aren't protective of our universal health care because of some national sentiment of loving each other so sooooo much. It was a hard, ugly battle to get it, with tons of opposition. Also, we have plenty of vicious hate among ourselves, in some ways far worse than the US.
We're protective of it because we have it now.
We recognize how valuable it is, and we look down south, shudder, and kiss our healthcards.
There's a reason we voted Tommy Douglas as The Greatest Canadian. Yep, in 2004, our national television broadcaster had a multi-part, two level vote across the country, and the guy who brought us Universal Healthcare was voted The Greatest Canadian in our entire history. No one was surprised by the results.
Lastly, you know what's great about publicly funded healthcare?? It really doesn't promote weird social control policies over our food or skiing (???) or anything, but it DOES have a HUGE impact on the effectiveness of other major policies, like those regarding immigration, crime, welfare, etc.
Yep. Stuff like crime policies are always looked at through a lense of how they will affect the burden on our healthcare system. Drugs, violence, etc. That shit all costs healthcare dollars, so we are highly motivated to research and implement policies that lower the burden to the healthcare system, and y'know, actually work.
When those policies don't work, the government feels the cost of their own failure quite quickly, so they are highly motivated. There's still plenty of fuckery, but increases in healthcare spending that correlate with a new policy are hard to ignore.
Neat, huh?
Our system isn't perfect, our doctors are always angry, our nurses threaten to strike, our wait times can be prohibitive, our non-urban regions are painfully underserved, our drugs and dental aren't covered, and the debate about two-tiered-semi-privatization rages on and on and on and always will.
It's a cluster fuck for sure. But it's a hell of a lot less of a cluster fuck than the US system, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
Do you know how nice it is to have a medical emergency, rush to the nearest ER and not have to worry about anything other than the medical emergency you are having at that very moment. Not a single thought of some weird non-itemized bill showing up down the road.
It's nice. It's very nice.