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Why deteriorating single-payer systems aid US healthcare investors
Canada's median wait tripled to 28.6 weeks. Britain's NHS misses 18-week targets. As single-payer systems struggle with innovation costs, US healthcare companies gain a structural advantage.
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The median Canadian wait for medical treatment has stretched from 9.3 weeks in 1993 to 28.6 weeks today. In Britain's National Health Service, only 65.3% of patients start treatment within 18 weeks. Those numbers weaken the case that government-run systems deliver better access than the messy American model.
The Free Press column making the argument puts it bluntly: "Government-run systems often (not always) do a perfectly fine job setting a broken arm or administering a long-standing, well-known medication. They do much less well when it comes to developing, financing, and delivering a new immunological approach to fighting cancer, personalized to your individual genome at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars."
The innovation pipeline – personalized therapies, gene editing, cell-based treatments – requires capital, pricing freedom, and dynamic investment. Britain's NHS is understaffed and underfunded. The country already carries high taxes and high debt, with slow economic growth. There is no obvious source of money to recapitalize the system. Canada's wait times have only increased over three decades, as giving healthcare away for free makes it impossible to satisfy demand in a timely manner.