It's not uncommon, when Republicans score a major political victory, for American liberals to throw up their hands and say, "Screw this! I'm moving to Canada."
More often than not, it's an empty threat—deterred either by the intricacies of the visa process or a glance at the January weather forecast in Winnipeg.
But what if the opposite happened? What if Canada moved here? Specifically, what if its healthcare system were to pack up, migrate southward, and rain its single-payer munificence over America, for a change?
To review, Canadian healthcare basically works like Medicare, but for everyone. Medical care is free, and it covers almost everything other than prescription drugs, glasses, and dental care. (Most people have supplementary insurance to cover those things). It keeps its drugs cheap by negotiating at a federal level with pharmaceutical companies.
Indiana University's Aaron Carroll offers a more thorough explanation of how it works in this video:
Earlier this year, the Commonwealth Fund released a ranking of 11 developed countries' healthcare systems. The American one, the world's most expensive, ranked dead last. As I wrote at the time, the U.S. scored poorly on managing administrative hassles for both doctors and patients, avoiding emergency-room use, and reducing duplicative medical testing, among other things.
To be fair, the Canadian system didn't fare much better, coming in 10th out of 11. Still, according to a new interactive released by the Commonwealth Fund and based on the earlier report, if Americans had Canada's healthcare, we might see some surprising gains in our quality of life and reductions in our healthcare expenditures.
First, the good news: 5,400 fewer babies would die in infancy, and we'd save about $1.3 trillion dollars in healthcare spending. (The green blocks on the right show the number of dollars or lives saved, while the red blocks on the left show the expenditures or deaths that would still happen.)
