We all know that Canada has free universal healthcare, and that it’s more effective and compassionate than the market-based(ish) system we have in the US, right? I mean, that’s what people have been telling me for decades.
That’s what they told me when I complained that the “Affordable” Care Act doubled my family’s health insurance costs in 2014. “It’s saving lives”, they said. “You can afford to pay twice as much so fewer people will die”. I couldn’t afford it, of course. Adding an additional $7000 per year to my family’s expenses meant that either I couldn’t pay my mortgage, or we had to give up heat and electricity with a 1-year-old in the house.
We were lucky. My wife is a teacher. We had access to reasonably good health insurance through her job (not as good as the private policy I’d bought for my company which we were no longer allowed to buy, but survivable), and it turned out to cost only about 10% more than what I had been paying before. If we hadn’t had that luck, we probably would have had to either sell the house or completely stop saving for retirement and college within a year or two. I’m not sure how many other small business owners were screwed this way, but the SBA’s numbers imply that there were at least 1.7M other single-employee companies would have been eligible for this same screwing.
So a lot of people paid a lot of money and/or lost hundreds of hours jumping through hoops just to deal with our new corporate-designed-and-owned “public” health insurance system. Was it worth it? Did we all pay that price and thereby save lives? I don’t know for certain. Every article I find on it is thoroughly partisan/ideological for one side or the other, and presents numbers that I heartily question, but I did find this NIH paper from 2006 (4 years before the ACA, and 8 years before it took full effect) that says 26000 Americans were dying yearly from “lack of health insurance”.
After being redirected to this topic by some news that was plastered all over the internet this morning, I did some research, and found something recent. Frankly, I don’t trust the numbers that much, coming as they do from a politician who has played fast and loose with facts before, and it would certainly be to his benefit to overstate, but last year Bernie Sanders, in yet another push to make the US medical system universal and tax-payer funded like Canada, announced that nearly 60,000 Americans die every year because they can’t get access to health care in a timely way.
So apparently, the ACA was a resounding success, resulting in an increase of perhaps 230% in the number of Americans dying from lack of access to care in the past 18 years. If my sarcasm isn’t obvious, I’ll be more clear. A lot of ordinary citizens (not providers, managers, or insurance companies, of course) got screwed out of a lot of money (probably billions in the grand scheme, all into corporate pockets) in order to reduce deaths due to lack of access to health care, and the return on that investment was that deaths due to lack of access to care increased by a factor of 2.3 in 18 years. Are the numbers perfect? No, probably not. However, both groups publishing these data like would have been motivated to fudge numbers high, given their ideological starting points, so it feels like the exaggerations probably cancel out, to some degree.
What got me looking into this today was seeing a half-dozen articles pointing to a recent analysis which finds that somewhere between 15,500 and 28,000 Canadians died last year while waiting for procedures or diagnostics that could have saved their lives. The variability, as I understand it, comes from missing data. The 28,000 number is an extrapolation of that missing data which I haven’t examined myself, so take it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, this got me thinking. Canada has the magic socialized health system we’ve all been repeatedly told is the paragon of health systems, one that the ACA moved us ever-so-slightly toward. So I did a little envelope math.
Let’s assume these numbers are correct for argument’s sake, and consider: There were about 41M Canadians and about 340M Americans last year. According to these numbers, Canada’s socialized healthcare system had a death rate for “lack of access” of approximately 68 deaths per 100k people. Using the same math, the USA’s public/private mishmash healthcare system had a death rate for “lack of access” of about approximately 18 deaths per 100,000 people. That’s a factor of nearly 4 LESS!
So if Canada’s lionized socialized healthcare system is killing 4 times as many people due to lack of access to care than the US’ current healthcare “system”, is it really the paragon we want to emulate? Even more, if we consider the US’ 2006 death rate due to lack of access (26,000), compared to our then 300M population, we are looking at approximately 9 deaths per 100,000. So, the new, “life saving” ACA version of US healthcare is ALSO killing twice as may Americans as the old system was!
Out of pure interest, if you compare our pre-ACA system to Canada (and this is weaker, I couldn’t find Canadian numbers for 2006), you will see that our previous horrible, barbaric, market-based system, corrupted by massive corporations and just the worst any activist could imagine nonetheless killed seven times less people due to lack of access than Canada’s current one is killing.
Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe all these numbers are lies, conservative misinformation propagated through noted right-wing mouthpieces like the NIH and liberal activist groups [end sarcasm]. But I’ve gotta tell you, unless there are some MAJOR issues with either these numbers or my math, I feel like maybe everything we’ve been told about the wonders of government-controlled healthcare is a load of crap…
Who wants to check my math?
