The funny thing is, you probably are not paying that much more in taxes [0]:

"The OECD analyzes the tax burdens of 35 countries, including the United States and Canada. According to its data, in terms of total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, in 2010, the U.S. collected a slightly lower than average amount of taxes from its citizens ($11,365 USD per capita). Canada collected a slightly higher than average amount ($14,693 USD)."

This is taxes per GDP, but marginal taxes are not that different either.

[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/07/canadians-may-pay-more-taxes...

And even that's misleading because of the high deductibles of all U.S. plans let alone if you happen to get a so-called high deductible plan (that qualifies for a Health Savings Account). To see a paid for benefit, other than those PPACA requires they be provided at no addition cost from the get go, you pay the annual "tax" in the form of a premium and then you pay the deductible, and then depending on the insurance and provider it will pay 50% to 90%. I estimate I'd have to spend ~$10,000 out of pocket before the first dollar "insurance" would pay. Per year, as the deductible resets.

Americans are consistently paying obscene amounts of money for no better results and in some cases, like the up thread type 1 diabetes example, vastly inferior.

When I lived in Israel, I used to pay about $100/month in health tax in one of the highest tax brackets, and after that, the only expensive is hospital parking, which is usually reimbursed.

A $3300 difference is a huge difference on a per capita basis. It's literally a 30% increase in tax burden on a per capita basis.

Though it is less than the $4k I pay per year to health insurance for a Bronze HDHP as a healthy 25-year-old.

Not to mention your copay.

Having employer-sponsored medical insurance is generally better than Canadian health care. I'm Canadian living in the US. Of course, having Canadian public health care is better when you don't have much money.

I needed an MRI. I got one the next day through Kaiser. My friend had a suspected gallstone. It took her 4 months to get an MRI scheduled. She had to live with pain during those 4 months.

Her children are both diagnosed with autism. It took 2.5 years to get therapy paid for by the government. The only other option besides waiting was to pay for therapy herself which was $80,000/year. She couldn't afford it so her children had to wait without therapy during the most crucial times for therapy. Recently, the Ford government decided upon spending cuts that will limit her youngest son with severe autism to 2 more years of care and then they get nothing.

With Kaiser, they have a top standard autism program where children get instantly put into. My friend is a medical doctor specializing in this and he said the Kaiser program was great. When I told him that my friend had to wait 2.5 years in Canada, he was shocked and saddened for the children.

Before the younger son could get diagnosed with autism, he had to undergo an MRI to ensure there wasn't anything specifically wrong with his brain. They waited 3.5 months, and then when they got to the MRI appointment, they were told their appointment was cancelled, and they had to wait another month.

My aunt was scheduled for gall stone surgery in Toronto but it was also months in advance. One weekend she went to emergency because was vomiting from pain. They put her in a bed and scheduled her for surgery at the hospital. If she left, she would have to wait for the scheduled surgery but if she took an emergency room spot, she could get surgery sooner. She had occupy that bed for 1.5 weeks until they finally scheduled her for surgery, taking the place of other patients. We asked if we could move her to another hospital that didn't have the wait and they said no, she had to stay in that hospital otherwise she would lose her place.

These are experiences just with people I know. I've lived much of my life with Canadian health care and I trust it. But what you don't pay with money you pay with time.

I've found that most people in the US want government health care, but they also want a private option, which is untenable for such a large country, and illegal in Canada. They have a 2 party health care system in Australia but the quality difference is vast. With public and private, you can criticism that only rich people get the best health care but with a single public system, everyone waits. So there's no great way.

>Having employer-sponsored medical insurance is generally better than Canadian health care.

Some lucky employees in the US have generous health insurance benefits. But the majority, by far, do not. Kaiser itself is a uniquely high performing organization, that serves a very small portion of the US population.

The employer has nothing to do with the quality of the healthcare the patient receives, other than being in a sufficiently lucrative business to be able to pay for nice health insurance. Health insurance and healthcare would be much better for everyone if employers were left out of the whole equation so that more healthy, lower cost lives get mixed in with higher cost lives in order to create a viable marketplace for multiple health insurance companies to be able to compete for business on healthcare.gov.

As a Canada-US transplant that's been my experience as well. If you have good coverage through work, you'll get better care in the US than in the public Canadian system.

Of course, not everyone in the US has good coverage through work...

We have that in Israel and it works fine. There are a lot of things i disagree with Israel about, but the way they do healthcare is one of the best in the world.

Israel is a small country. Small countries can do things like universal health care. Canada is only 1/10 the size of the US. Large countries like the US have a much harder time as can be seen today.

What does that have to do with anything? If anything it should be cheaper because the risk pool is much larger and the population density is much higher. A big part of Canada's healthcare cost is due to the huge geographic distribution of the population.

The truth is American elites systemically abuse poor people and feed them propaganda to make sure they don't question their terrible conditions. You're repeating that propaganda.

In Canada, you can pay for a whole variety of things, from imaging (to reference your MRI examples) to day surgeries. I've done both. In fact, I paid for a shoulder MRI just last year and only had to wait a few days.

Kaiser doesn't treat many people over the age of 65, because the overwhelming majority of them aren't working, and those that are, aren't working somewhere they can get Kaiser healthcare.

Any healthcare system can be made 'cheap' and 'good', if it mostly cuts out old people.

If Canada just kicked old people off the healthcare bus to die alone, I'm sure both the waitlists, and the tax bills would be a lot smaller.

I don't think you've been in a Kaiser facility if you believe this.

> Kaiser doesn't treat many people over the age of 65

I know a couple people over 65 who are at Kaiser.