For the 88% of Americans who are insured, their wait times are lower than in rich Western European countries and Canada, and far lower than poorer Western European countries like Italy.
Here's an article about people in Canada paying for surgery in the U.S. to avoid waiting forever for their surgery: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/calgary/Long+Canadian+wait...
Have you ever seen an article about people going to Canada for superior medical care? No. Canadian medical care is clearly cheaper but also inferior.
No, we're talking about wait times for people in the respective countries. If you think wait times of six months are excessive, you should be incensed about "forever".
> Have you ever seen an article about people going to Canada for superior medical care?
I would suspect the citizenship/residency requirements make this difficult in practice, as does their legal ban on a parallel private system.
Meanwhile, if going overseas for care is a bad sign, as you allege, the US sees the same thing:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/americans-fle...
"Lots of people are pointing out that this isn’t really true, but I want to point out something different: Americans flee the US in pretty similar numbers to Canadians fleeing Canada. The best numbers we have suggest that about 45,000 Canadians left the country for medical care in 2015. (That’s all destinations, not just the US.) Meanwhile, about 250,000 Americans left the US for medical care abroad. And these numbers don’t even count the number of Americans who get their prescription drugs from overseas."
What's the surgical wait time for an uninsured American?
That's 12.2% of America, or forty million people. http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/16/news/economy/uninsured-ameri...
In some cases, this winds up being an infinite wait time: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02...
Side-note: I'm citing a whole bunch of sources in my replies to you. Maybe you could do so for your "10x, 20x" numbers?