That’s the fucking point! Private insurance is more expensive than single-payer. EVERY DAMN TIME. In the US, our private, for-profit healthcare system costs more than double the median of OEDC per capita, for demonstrably worse outcomes.
Most of the countries with socialized medicine also have private supplemental health insurance available. It covers beyond what the single-payer service covers, including aesthetic and elective procedures as well as physicians and clinics that either only take private patients or give preference to them. What it doesn’t do is supplant single-payer. Everyone has single-payer and everyone contributes taxes toward it.
Specifically, from the article you cited, 56% of Canadians had to wait more than 48 hours. What doesn’t show in the statistics for the US, which is at 52% wait >48 hours, is that those numbers only cover people who are insured, and ignores the people who are uninsured or under-insured.
Yes, but not magically, and not overnight. Another weakness of the US healthcare system is intentional, planned scarcity. We don’t train enough physicians and nurses, and that’s intentional. The AMA wants an under-supply of physicians in order to keep physician pay high. That will need to change. The good bit is that all the time physicians spend on stupid business administration will be greatly reduced. The physicians with the highest job satisfaction are ones in systems like Kaiser Permanente, where they don’t make as much money as private practice but they have very low paperwork burden and zero business management stress.
