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Other than perhaps a few super rich donors who have the President of a Hospital on speed-dial, people in the U.S. don't have their wait times determined by anything financial. That's probably why when the Canadian Institute for Health Information did a study on wait times in 11 countries, they discovered the private systems did the best (25%), the "mixed" systems the next best (37%), while the wait times in countries with public health systems had about double (50% average) the number of people who reported waiting more than a month for an appointment to see a specialist. The worst being Canada (58.5%), with Norway, Sweden and the UK a little better.

5% of Americans can afford health insurance, but don't bother, mostly healthier and younger people. Less than 5% of Americans are uninsured because they think health insurance is too expensive for them. That 5% are covered by State programs (which they can enroll in after treatment and still get it paid for) if they are actually poor. The best thing the U.S. could do to improve things for everyone is to remove the laws and regulations which have pushed up health and health insurance costs in the U.S. over time.

Despite "free healthcare" you're gonna be waiting a long time for surgery, say 1.5yrs for cataract,

Um, no. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Care, 71% receive treatment within 112 days, 90% within 210 days. I don't know where you get 540 days from.

Actually proportionally Israel is way more popular than the US. Medical tourism to the US is basically an exception.

Here's the actual data: https://www.cihi.ca/sites/defa... The average treatment time for cancer in Canada is less than 20 days. In the US many people simply used to get NO cancer treatment whatsoever.

The best option? Tear down ALL the borders. Everybody has a right to move and live where they want.

here won't be a 'home country'. Home is where you live. Better to make the social programs global. There's plenty of money locked up in the financial industry to do it.

I certainly hope you are trolling, cause otherwise you are an idiot.

Your "solution" that makes a cute sound bite but is obviously unworkable on any number of levels. Who would "tear down the borders? Which social programs would be provided? Which government would be in charge? How would you resolve the vast social, cultural, religious and historical differences among the populace?

Even if we magically managed to resolve the above, there would still be huge issues of disparity between resource rich and resource poor areas. i.e. this would cause all sorts of new problems and not solve any of the existing ones.

BTW, the US financial sector was worth about $6.2 trillion in 2014. The US spends about $3.8 trillion on healthcare annually. There is not "plenty of money locked up in the financial system to pay for it"

Hell, Canada spent $214.9 billion on health care in 2014.

My beef is not with your pointing out the waiting period to see a specialist.

Per this report, of the 85% of Canadians with a family doctor, the average wait time to see the GP was 2 days. The report also ranks Canada dead last among countries compared on this metric, with only 45% able to see their doctor within two days for an illness.

But, when you first wrote "for a GP, most wait less than 30 days" you implied that a significant minority (which you've now explicitly stated as 20-30%) face 30+ days to see a GP.

Please quote the text and link to source (if not the wiki article) that says 20-30% had to wait more than a month to see a GP, or at least give me the actual number they used so I can search for it. I'm not seeing anything that could be reasonably interpreted the way you have.

That public insurance plan your gov wants will not be free. No matter what the cost is in the first couple of years it will continue to go up year by year. Like it says in that page, in 2010 the cost of that insurance plan was around 191 billion. I don't know exactly what will the cost be in the USA but it will be higher that's for sure.

Right now the health sector is worth around 33.1% of our provincial budget. It started smaller of course but over time, the budget for the healthcare system grew bigger and bigger and there's still no limit today. In the last provincial budget, nothing is done to take care of our deficit. This also includes the health care system.

We could make sweeping conclusions about the Canadian healthcare system using a handful of anecdotes from an anonymous poster. Or we could look at statistics from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. For province-by-province wait times, look here. The section on bypass surgery starts on page 26. For Ontario, Canada's most populous province, the median wait time in the reporting period (April 1 to September 30, 2010) was under 10 days, and the 90th percentile was about 40 days.

We could make sweeping conclusions about the Canadian healthcare system using a handful of anecdotes from an anonymous poster. Or we could look at statistics from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. For province-by-province wait times, look here. The section on bypass surgery starts on page 26. For Ontario, Canada's most populous province, the median wait time in the reporting period (April 1 to September 30, 2010) was under 10 days, and the 90th percentile was about 40 days.

Just found the numbers:
NHE (National Health Expenditure) $7,681 per person (for 2008).

Source: http://www.cms.hhs.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/25_NHE_Fact_Sheet.asp#TopOfPage

And...
In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, among 26 countries with similar accounting systems in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), per capita spending on health care remained highest in the United States (US$7,290). The U.S. was followed by Norway (US$4,763), Switzerland (US$4,417) and Luxembourg (US$4,162). At around US$3,895 per capita, health care spending in Canada was similar to six other OECD countries, including the Netherlands, Austria, France and Germany.
http://www.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=media_20091119_e

Japan's lost in a war, and "has no military force" as its government says(JSDF *officially* isn't a military force), so such devices "that can be used for invasion " are unlikely paid. On the other hand, considering there's a health insurance system, which limits pays from patient to 10-30%, or sometimes even less, mandated for every Japanese citizen, plus growing amount of elderly, healthcare business really pay well. No real reason to try selling those kind of devices to JSDF.

# Just take a look at this.

And, once you get a completely nationalised health system, you effectively have a system equivalent to insurance with the largest possible pool.

Actually, no, because there is virtually no risk involved: EVERYONE gets sick, and EVERYONE dies, and about half of EVERYONE's health care costs come in the last six months of life.

Although costs vary, they don't vary by that much, although the tail of the distribution is long. See figure B1 in this report on Canadian health care costs to see the actual distribution. For something over 70% of the population the average cost of a single hospital stay is less than $10,000, and virtually everyone has a couple of those stays in their lifetime (I've had one despite being in extremely good health generally.)

This is utterly unlike true insurance models--auto, home and term life--where the majority of people who pay premiums never collect a claim.

It is interesting to note that both the Canadian and American health care systems use insurance models, and suffer from similar problems of access and spiralling costs. I believe this is due to the inherent inappropriateness of an insurance model for a service that everyone will need and everyone which has a relatively low variance of total payouts.

A reasonable model of health insurance would deal with catastrophic costs only, say in excess of $10,000 per hospital stay as indicated by these data. As not everyone falls into that category, one could actually use insurance to spread RISK, which is not really possible under an "everyone pays, everyone benefits" model because the tails are not that relevant to the overall cost of the system, so you basically have a situation where there is very little risk to be spread (closer analysis of the numbers could contradict that, but that's my impression from a first look.)

Sugar is used in Canada, is obesity a problem there?

According to a quick Google search: Yep.

Personally, I'd blame videogames more than sugar. More and more kids spend their play time sitting in front of these machines than they do outside playing physical games. That's the entire reason they're getting DDR machines, the concept is to somehow combine videogames and physical activity.

Given that all the fat people I know who got DDR based on that theory are STILL fat (if not fatter) I doubt this will actually work. You can lead a fat horse to water, but you can't get them to stop eating Twinkies and sitting on their duff... (In fact, I know one fat bastard who's probably up to a good 400 pounds and "plays DDR" - his diet got WORSE because he thought he was "doing something healthy". I wondering if he realizes you have to use the pad, not the controller...)

If you really want to lose weight, WALK DAILY! It's easy, FREE, and actually works!

Oh, BTW, In our system, you choose your doctor. They're not "assigned" to you.

According to The Canadian Institute for Health Information, in 2003, Canada spent a total of $121 Billion CDN on health care (this is the cost the government pays for the universal health system). With a population of ~30 million, that's $4,000 CDN/person.

For your family of 4, that's $16,000 CDN/year or $12,000 US at a 30% exchange rate. That works out to $1,000 US/month Canada is paying and your $400 health insurance is a lot better than my $1000 health care.

Jason
ProfQuotes