The U.S. Health Care System Isn’t So Bad | Opinion

Following the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the mores of the farthest reaches of social media have made their way to Congress.

Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said, “The visceral response from people across the country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the healthcare system. … People can only be pushed so far.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said, “Anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.”

Wait until Warren and Ocasio-Cortez find out what’s happening in Canada and the United Kingdom. If “denied claims” are violence, then Canada and Britain are in a permanent state of low-grade warfare.

The Canadians have banned private health insurance for anything deemed medically necessary by the state. That has not resulted in a socialist paradise, where no medical claim is ever denied. The state keeps a lid on spending by forcing Canadians to wait—and wait and wait—for care.

This year, the median wait for care from a specialist following referral by a general practitioner was 30 weeks, according to research published this month by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. That’s up from 27.7 weeks just last year. And it’s more than triple the median wait of 9.3 weeks in 1993, when Fraser started keeping track.

They wait for access to advanced technology, too. The median wait for an MRI was over 16 weeks this year; for a CT scan, it was more than eight weeks.

Canada’s single-payer health plan effectively denies claims for novel prescription drugs in advance—by refusing to cover them at all. Of the 460 new medicines launched worldwide between January 2012 and December 2021, just 45 percent were available in Canada as of October 2022.

Americans, by contrast, had access to 85 percent of those new medicines.

The story is similar in Britain. Private insurance is legal across the Atlantic; around 1 in 8 Britons has it. They buy it because wait times for care in the publicly run health care system are interminable.

About 7.5 million people were on waiting lists for National Health Service (NHS) treatment in England when the current Labor government took office earlier this year—an increase of 66 percent since before the pandemic.

Just over two-thirds of people in England who received a cancer diagnosis started treatment within two months of an urgent referral in October 2024. So thousands of people are waiting longer than is clinically advisable for cancer care. One literature review published in the BMJ, a medical journal, found that a four-week delay in cancer surgery was associated with a 6-8 percent increase in mortality risk.

More than 420,000 Britons were on wait lists for heart care as of October 2024. Forty percent of them had been waiting for time-sensitive cardiac care for more than 18 weeks.

The British government also rations access to cutting-edge medicines. Less than 6 in 10 new medicines that hit the market between 2012 and 2021 were available in Britain as of October 2022.

Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, and their progressive allies would love to channel public frustration with the U.S. health insurance system into support for a government takeover of the sector. But private health insurers look positively spendthrift compared with public payers in Canada and Great Britain, who deny care before patients even have the chance to ask for it.

Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith fellow in health care policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All (Encounter 2020). Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @sallypipes.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.