[AChimp]

Canadian and British troops also burned down Washington and stole a painting. :O

Anyways, no one's claiming that the Canadian public health care system is perfect; there's a lot of things wrong with it. The problem with wait times usually comes down to a lack of resources.

If there was more capacity, wait times would come down. If there's only one MRI machine, and it can only do 30 scans per day, bitching about it won't make the machine work any faster. Adding more machines would help, but they cost millions of dollars which is paid for by the government, which has to spread the money around to everything. Private hospitals in the US can do whatever they want with their profits, so if adding more equipment brings in more patients, then that's what they do.

If you're looking for elective surgery, you're going to wait because you're not allowed to pay more to skip to the front of the line. People who think they're the most important person in the world travel to the US to visit private clinics, and these are usually the cases that you see covered in the media. These people didn't NEED treatment or they wanted it faster.

If you visit an emergency room, yeah, you're probably going to have to wait due to something called triage. When people who are in worse shape than you show up, they're moved to the front of the line because they need the attention right away. And honestly, a lot of people visit emergency rooms for bullshit reasons because of a false sense of entitlement.

Nobody has to worry about how they're going to pay for a visit to the hospital, though. Nobody has to worry about money if their kid gets sick and needs a bunch of medicine. Nobody has to worry about whether or not they can afford to even SEE a doctor if they feel sick.