The Wall Around the Waiting Room

You don’t build a wall around a paradise, at least not to keep people in. East Germany put up the Berlin Wall in 1961 because its own people were fleeing by the millions, and the only way to keep them was concrete, barbed wire, and guards with orders to shoot.

The East Berliners knew exactly what they’d been kept from, which is why the second that wall came down, they were rushing to buy groceries. They knew very well what communist grocery stores were like and were ready to finally enjoy free market abundance on the other side of the wall.

A system people would choose doesn’t need a wall. A system that can’t satisfy people eventually has to stop them from leaving. Remember that, because it’s the whole story of government healthcare.

“All We Want Is Healthcare”

The people who want the government to monopolize healthcare have learned not to lead with communism. They couch the underlying evil in warm and fuzzy terms. They just want to guarantee everyone healthcare, and they definitely don’t hate America… even while castigating America as backwards and cruel for “denying people healthcare.”

Nobody is against people getting care. The question is whether we accept a government monopoly.

Having monopolized K-12 education and wrecked it, they now need a total, single-payer monopoly of the healthcare system too. They practically have it now. Most of the problems with US healthcare are the fault of the government controlling, through various mechanisms, 84% of healthcare spending. But that’s not good enough. You need to build that wall. You need to keep people in. You need to ban competition. And so it’s time for Medicare for All.

When Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the gang say “Medicare for All,” they don’t just mean expanding Medicare in its current form. Sanders’s own bill would replace almost all private health insurance with one government plan. One plan, one payer, no way out.

We know what that vision looks like because we have it to the north, and it’s actually also called Medicare. The Canadian single-payer system is what the progressive left wants us to emulate, so let’s give it its due.

Canada does have relatively cheaper drug prices than the US. Of course, that’s because we invent and pay for the development of most new drugs. Reproducing drugs that already exist and are proven to work is basically free, so the rest of the world replicates them generically for nothing.

If you want medicines to keep being invented, somebody has to pay full price, and that somebody is America. You can’t scale this to include America without breaking it for literally everyone.

Canada also has long waiting times. According to a 2016 Commonwealth Fund survey, wait times for specialists of two months or longer are five times as common in Canada as in the US. For elective surgery, wait times of four months or longer are also five times as common. At least along those metrics, the Canadian system is literally five times worse.

In the US, we spend 18% of GDP on healthcare, government and private combined. Spending 18% of your income to preserve your health doesn’t strike me as being completely crazy as long as you’re getting your money’s worth, not that I’d say our system is nearly as efficient as it should be.

But in Canada, the “getting your money’s worth” is entirely out of your hands. If the system covers a treatment, you generally can’t buy it privately. For Canadians, the only unforgivable sin is “two-tier medicine.” Even if you can afford to pay for private care without waiting in line, you’re denied that option. Their public healthcare sucks, so the solution is to trap you in the system. That’s East Berlin economics. Canada is a poorer society that gets worse healthcare overall, but as long as it’s equally bad, it’s good. Envy is a virtue.

The Wall Goes Up

This is what single-payer really means. When the government pays, when it has the power to deliver everything, it has the power to take everything away.

Canada legalized medical assistance in dying, MAID, in 2016. In 2024, 16,499 people were killed by doctors in the Canadian healthcare system, about one in every twenty deaths in the country. That’s more than the 15,364 Americans killed in gun homicides that year, and that’s not per capita. It’s in raw numbers, from a country with less than an eighth of our population. The MAID program started with elderly, terminal patients. It hasn’t stayed there. Since 2021, you don’t have to be dying to qualify, and the country has since made moves to expand the program to people suffering solely from mental illness.

Many Canadians don’t realize that for eligible patients, doctors are expected to suggest death as a “treatment option.” This policy is extreme even among the countries with legal euthanasia, where that conduct is not even legal, never mind encouraged.

Think about the incentive. A system that carries the bill for your care also keeps the savings from your death. That doesn’t take a conspiracy. It only takes a bureaucracy with the power to say no and a budget that’s better balanced when it does.

One story about Canada’s MAID program went viral last month. A Canadian man said that three years ago, when his wife was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer, the system left her with no hope and mailed her a pamphlet on MAID. At the last minute, they fled to Texas. Today she’s hiking two hours up a mountain peak while still in treatment. Her doctors here encourage her to live her life, not end it.

Advocates for MAID call it “medical care.” The same people often talk about abortion the same way. Killing is not care.

This is the inherent nature of utopian progressivism. The vision of utopia is set forth. Of course, it’s impossible, so you have to force it. Everything that is not mandated is forbidden. And what does it result in? Horror.

There’s one reason why the state takes control of healthcare. It’s not equity, justice, equality, or whatever other buzzword you want to insert here. It’s to control the population at its point of maximum vulnerability. The people selling you warm and fuzzy “free” healthcare don’t actually care about care. It is always and everywhere, without exception, about control. If you rely on me for your health, I have control over you.