Single-Payer Debate: Forget Canada, Look at Mexico

The for-profit health care industry spends enormous amounts of time and money trying to convince us that Canada's overwhelmingly popular single-payer health care system (i.e. socialism) is worse than ours.
For instance, just look at the tens of thousands of Canadians coming to the U.S. for health care every year.

The Fraser Institute, a Canadian public policy think tank, estimates that 52,513 Canadians received non-emergency medical treatment in the U.S. and other countries in 2014, a 25 percent jump from the roughly 41,838 who sought medical care abroad the previous year.
In citing those numbers in its 2015 report, "Leaving Canada for Medical Care," the organization said difficulties in obtaining timely medical care at home is, increasingly, leading Canadians to seek it abroad.

Those are real numbers. Wait times for elective procedures are very long in Canada.
However, the numbers mean nothing unless you can compare them to something for context.
Fortunately it isn't hard to find a comparison. Just look south.

An estimated 952,000 Californians enter Mexico to receive health care annually, including prescription drugs, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Nearly a million Californians - just Californians - go to Mexico every year for health care needs. That's more in one month than all the Canadians going to America in a full year.
Context changes everything.

What's that got to do with universal single-payer health care?
Five years ago, Mexico, a still developing nation, achieved universal health care.

Despite periods of economic downturns and crisis, Mexico recently achieved a significant milestone – enrolling 52.6 million previously uninsured Mexicans in public medical insurance programs and thereby achieving universal health coverage in less than a decade.
...According to Knaul, as of April this year “every Mexican, regardless of their socioeconomic situation, has access to the financial protection in health that shields them from facing the terrible choice between impoverishment and suffering or even death.”
“Mexico devised and implemented a reform and then demonstrated, with evidence, how a large, middle-income country can transform its health system and successfully achieve universal health coverage in one decade,” said Minister Chertorivski, an alum of Harvard Kennedy School and a participant in the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Forum, which convened for the first time in June.

Let's stop to take this in: Around a million Americans flee the United States every year to get health care in a country with a socialist single-payer health care system.
Let's see Republicans talk about that.

That's not to say Mexico's health care system isn't without serious flaws.
It is a developing nation, after all. But then in some ways, so are we.

Life expectancy at birth will continue to climb substantially for residents of industrialized nations — but not in the United States, where minimal gains will soon put life spans on par with those in Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to an extensive analysis released Tuesday.

No examination of this issue is complete without doing a full comparison.

Seguro Popular provides unemployed and poor Mexicans with access to preventative healthcare services such as diabetes screening and vaccinations, as well as treatment for chronic and severe illnesses.
Enrollees don’t have to pay a fee at the time of the doctor visit.
The program is supported by a mix of federal and state funds — similar to how the Medicaid program for low-income Americans is funded.
The poorest families pay nothing to join Seguro Popular. The rest pay a premium based on their income.
...
In the past 10 years, the number of Mexicans who experienced “impoverishing” health care costs fell from 3.3 percent to 0.8 percent.

A similar rating isn’t listed for the United States. But a CDC survey found that in 2016, 16 percent of Americans under 65 years old were parts of families that had trouble paying their medical bills.

The United States is literally surrounded by socialist single-payer universal health care: Mexico, Canada, Russia, and Cuba.
And Americans are already voting for single-payer with their wallets and their feet.

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detroitmechworks's picture

They already make it insanely hard for anyone with any kind of debt to leave the country legally...

I don't think they want us bringing back tales of how those "Socialist Hellholes" actually are quite pleasant.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

snoopydawg's picture

@detroitmechworks

and realize that the increase in numbers of people that are trying to get into this country is because of what our government has done in theirs.
Many of the people crossing the border are coming from Honduras after we helped destabilize the government. Another thing that Hillary had her hand in.
Parents are desperate to get their kids out because of the violence.
Remember Hillary's suggestion for stopping the flow of immigrants?
"Send them back to teach their parents a lesson".
Some of the kids that were deported back to their country were killed hours after they got there.
And Obama did just that. People are upset about Trump ending DACA and rounding up other immigrants for deportations. But people have forgotten that Obama deported more immigrants than other presidents.
Hopefully this amnesia about his 8 years in office will end sometime soon.
I can't remember the other country that we destabilized and people are fleeing from it too.

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How is your recovery going, gj? I hope that you have a good handle on your pain and healing nicely.

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Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?

Bollox Ref's picture

recently had cataracts removed, courtesy of the UK's NHS... all on time and gratis.

Of course, he had to survive wards reminiscent of Florence Nightingale's Crimea..... (/s)

The U.S. needs to get real about health care for all. You'd think business would love to drop the whole employee/insurance administration nightmare.

(Edited for slight cock-up)

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

Let's see Republicans politicians talk about that. Here in California where the Dumbocrats have complete control, the assembly passed a Medi-Care for all bill. The Senate leader stopped it (so Gov. Brown wouldn't have the embarrassment of a veto). This isn't about R vs. D it's about 1% vs. 99%--and so far the Corporations are winning.

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chuck utzman

TULSI 2020

dervish's picture

What's our excuse again?

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

edg's picture

@dervish

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dervish's picture

Unfortunately it only applied to sailors.

John Adams signed the bill into law and created the Marine Hospital Service.

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

divineorder's picture

@dervish History lesson !

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

MarilynW's picture

It is linked to the Koch's Cato Institute. I wouldn't trust their figures at all. They are constantly harping against medicare.

Canadian medicare is fine although not without problems as in any human endeavour. Right wing governments keep chipping away at it for one thing.

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To thine own self be true.

@MarilynW
to show that even their inflated numbers don't matter in comparison.

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Most of my spouse's patients are immigrants or kids of immigrants from Central America. Some of the kids have dual citizenship with Mexico. Recently two independent families have said that their eldest started College...back in Mexico. Similar quality and a LOT cheaper.

Hope you are healing fast.

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divineorder's picture

to pay for her technical nursing facility stay. Or I should say the family found this for her. She has Alzheimers. So I cringe everytime I think of Medicaid being cut or black granted.

jb and I have been getting dental care in Costa Rica every year for most of the last 7.

We didn't start doing this on purpose, just went back to CR in 2010 for the first time since a trip there in the 80's.

Our dentist in Austin retired the year after we did and we needed a teeth cleaning.

Serendipity . Found a dentist in a remote coastal town , while cleaning our teeth she found I had a cracked molar. Got her to put on a crown and was astounded at the price. Been going back every year to that community to kayak but while there get dental work as well. Some trips the savings over US prices has offset the costs of a 6 to 8 week trip!

Thanks so much for this essay! Viva Mexico!

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

Song of the lark's picture

Polictians that are the problem. It's the extractionary cartels and rackets that are sucking us dry that are our problem. That list is long.

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travelerxxx's picture

@Song of the lark

... IN a way it's not even the Polictians that are the problem. It's the extractionary cartels and rackets that are sucking us dry that are our problem.

I often feel this is so and always recall The Powell Memo. The strategy proposed in that blueprint has succeeded beyond the author's wildest expectation. It occurs to me that the politicians are simply the water-carriers, the paid whores - employees, if you will. One can almost have sympathy for them, but not quite. In the end, it's unfettered Capitalism that remains the festering problem. Our corrupt politicians are simply a cost of doing business to the Capitalists; that expense being no different than any other employee's wages.

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enhydra lutris's picture

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Canada has used US hospitals as overflow, because we have so much overcapacity in urban areas. Patients would get sent down to Seattle for treatment, and this would count as "coming to the US for medical care," but their bills would get paid by BC Med.

I don't know if this still occurs, though. Costs have exploded in the last twenty years.

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Ken in MN's picture

...if every other advanced and advancing country on the planet is already doing it. For Democrats to still claim as much with a straight face is a testament to the total toxicity of the Clinton Legacy within the Party. But, hey! Russia! Bernie Bros! Sexism! (Those are all sexy, and she has books to sell to rubes...)

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I want my two dollars!