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10.47 Canadian vs American Medical Care
There are two videos here, in the first an announcer talks about Canadian and U.S. health care and Canadian health care sounds a lot better. In the second Steven Crowder goes to Canada and tries to get health care. He also interviews Canadians about their health care. You get a totally different picture of Canadian health care and how it compares with U.S. health care from the two videos.
An announcer from channel 13 talks about Canadian and U.S. health care in the video below. This video was made 5 years ago.
America does have government health insurance in addition to private health insurance. The Federal government and state governments pay for medicaid. Medicaid is insurance for low income families, children, individuals with disabilities and the elderly. Medicare is a federal health insurance program for people age 65 or older although it covers some people under 64 with certain disabilities. Medicare has part A and B. Part A covers hospital stays and part B is medical insurance. If you work for 10 or more years and pay Medicare taxes you will get part A for free. People have to pay for part B and can't get part A if they don't pay for part B. Both part A and part B have deductibles that have to be paid before they cover health care costs.
The idea behind having a deductible is that it makes the policy holder more likely to take risks that can result in high expenses. A good way to explain this is with car insurance. A person who knows he'll have to pay if his car is stolen is less likely to leave his car in a dangerous area where it is likely to be stolen. That means the insurance company is less likely to have to pay also. A small deductible can save an insurance company a lot of money and the result is the insurance company can charge lower premiums.
In the video below Steven Crowder flies to Canada and finds out for himself what Canadian health care is like. He made this video in 2010.
One lesson I get from these two videos is that sometimes the way to find out about a place is to go there in person and not rely on what people tell you about the place on TV. It also sends the message to be skeptical when people quote the results of surveys. The first video gives the impression that Canadians our happier with their medical care than Americans are by referring the results of a survey. Since that doesn't make sense I did a google search and found another survey that said that Canadians are less satisfied with their access to medical care than Americans are. I did find a survey that said that Canadians would prefer their "free" health care system be expanded than that they have to pay more private insurance. Maybe that's why in the first video the announcer said a survey said Canadians were more happy with their health system. Wanting more free stuff doesn't mean you're happy with your health system.
Around 100,000 Canadians are likely to cross the border each year for medical care. If Canadian health care is better why are they doing that?
The above two videos were made 10 years apart. That raises the question of whether wait times for health care had gone down between the time Crowder's video was made and channel 13's video was made. A google search shows the opposite, in 2024 Canada's wait time reached the longest ever recorded. There is no way Canadians are happy with that.
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