So I waited for 6 months behind a number of people including those who had similar non-critical injuries but were diagnosed earlier and those who had severe knee injuries requiring reconstruction or replacement. Rationing was done on a need basis rather than my ability to pay. Some people may talk about how terrible this is, and to be honest I probably could have afforded the surgery in a "private" system. Then again, when I was much younger and needed my first knee surgery I would have been hosed in a private system. And no, I wouldn't have been covered under my parent's policy in a private system.
Furthermore, when I have required urgent care, I have received it immediately. The longest I have waited is a few hours in the emergency room. Close friends who have dealt with much more serious life-threatening diseases have started receiving treatment/surgery within a few days or even the same day.
So yes, I experienced the terrible gulag that are Canadian medical wait lists and it really wasn't that bad. The wait lists are based on triaging, rather than wealth, and having wait times based on medical decisions made by professionals rather than economic incentives seems a much more humane system to me. I understand that some will call this "unfair" but that just means our definition of fair is different.
There are some exceptions, but generally things work well.
Citation sorely needed. This claim is regularly trot around, but nobody has been able to point to data that would suggest that this is anything but extreme outlier behavior.
As a Canadian who lives in the US it's often shocking how different the perception of the Canadian health care system is between the US and Canada. Canadians by and large are quite satisfied with the system, while even reasonably liberal Americans I've met seem to believe it's some kind of waitlist-filled hellhole.
I've had more than one American express incredulity when I pointed out going to the US for major medical procedures isn't really a thing in Canada, where they thought it was widespread and relatively common.
By my own observation, there are a few isolated cases of this happening (mostly among the extremely wealthy), and is not at all widespread.
> "but there needs to be some method of exclusion when demand is high and supply is low."
The supply of medical capacity is not fixed or subject to a real physical limitation (like, say, rare earth metals). In Canada the response to constricted supply has been expanding the supply, as well as reducing per-use costs to make this possible. The supply is not infinite, but is high enough that people who need it, get it, and at a cost affordable to them (amortized across the entire population).
[edit] It's worth mentioning that, due to the economic incentive of single-payer health care, Canada invests a tremendous amount of money in preventative care and screening, which serves to dramatically reduce demand for the most expensive, most supply-constrained treatments. In fact I have a friend who works for the Canadian government right now doing computational screening for early cancer detection. It's interesting stuff, saves lives, and saves money, but requires a dramatic economic incentive to build out that simply doesn't exist in privatized care.
> "Would you rather wait 2 months just to see a specialist and another 2 months for treatment like patients in nationalized healthcare systems frequently do? (I'm looking at you, Canada and Europe)"
Citation, again, sorely needed. I grew up in Canada and have never waited 2 months to see a specialist, nor 2 months for treatment. The longest I've waited for a specialist was a few days. I've also (unfortunately) been to both Canadian ERs and American ERs, and the wait times are not substantially different (immediate (Can), 4 hours (Can), 7 hours (Can), and 6 hours (US)).