Mr. Trump, Let's Examine Canada's Healthcare Hellscape, Shall We?

If you’re among the 66 million Americans who watched/survived the living nightmare that was the second Presidential Debate, you may have noticed Canada made a brief appearance. It was easy to miss (amid the all dictatorial threats and unstoppable sex appeal of Ken Bone), but Il Douche used his answer to a question about the Affordable Healthcare Act to take aim at America’s neighbo(u)r to the north:

[Hillary] wants to go to a single-payer plan, which would be a disaster, somewhat similar to Canada. And if you haven’t noticed, the Canadians, when they need a big operation, when something happens, they come into the United States in many cases because their system is so slow. It’s catastrophic in certain ways.

Normally, even the most fleeting reference to Canada on a big American TV show sends Canucks into a frenzy. But this time, Canadians reacted to Trump’s missive with near unanimous confusion. Surely, this man--usually so careful and coherent with his public statements--has made a mistake? Because the only part of his statement true to the Canadian experience is where he said Americans “haven’t noticed” us.

But Republicans tell me socialized medicine is the Devil!

Unless you’ve been trapped under a pile of old pizza boxes since the Reagan administration, you probably know that The Donald is not the first GOP candidate to paint Canada’s single-payer system as some sort of Orwellian hellscape. For years, nearly every attempt to expand healthcare coverage or accessibility in the U.S. has been met with charges from the right that such plans have been “disastrous” in Canada. According to them, 90% of Canadians die in the waiting room before seeing a doctor and the other 10% are murdered by some kind of death enforcement agency, like in Logan’s Run.  And they’re right.

Universal medical coverage really has been a disaster for Canadians...so long as you somehow get the entire English speaking world to change the meaning of disaster to “a wild success that benefits pretty much everyone.”

In fact, Canadian Healthcare has been so disastrous compared to its American counterpart that we have significantly lower obesity rates, lower infant mortality, and live an average of three years longer--all despite the fact that we eat three times the number of doughnuts. And for all this quality service, Canadians pay ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. No bills. No co-pays. No filing of claims. No medical debt. Nothing.

This is what makes Trump’s criticisms especially confounding. That guy hates paying for stuff! You’d think walking out of a Canadian hospital after paying $0.00 for neurosurgery would give him the same pride-boner he gets from not paying his taxes. Moreover, Canada offers so many free medical services that would benefit Donald specifically: everything from dermatology to treat his excessive orange-ness problem to experimental hand enlargement surgery. Not to mention the world-class mental health coverage he so clearly needs.

Well if it's so great, how come millions of Canadians flock to the States for treatment, huh?

Because they don’t. Like, at all. Not to alarm anyone, but Trump appears to have badly misunderstood the available data. Either that, or he has a pathological compulsion to lie nearly every time he opens his mouth in order to feed the narcissism he uses to mask the emptiness he feels deep inside. You decide!

According to the most comprehensive research on the subject, the percentage of Canadians that electively seek medical treatment in the U.S. is 0.11%, or roughly nine times larger than the percentage of his income Trump gives to charity. Characterizing all Canadians by the actions of 0.11% makes as much sense as judging all Americans by the actions of the no-good heathens in Cincinnati (as much as we’d all like to).

The one factor that Donald gets correct is that Canadians wait longer for some services than a(n insured) patient would in the States, but not nearly to a degree that could be considered “catastrophic in a lot of ways,” especially when weighed against the difference in out-of-pocket costs. Maybe rich Canadians like Céline Dion or the guy that played "Snake" on DeGrassi can afford to drop $100,000 on an instant American hip replacement, but the rest of us are willing to wait the extra three weeks to get it for free.

To put it in other terms, imagine the difference between Canadian and American healthcare as two restaurants. They have a few minor differences, but have the same menus and same basic quality of food. Would you rather eat at the restaurant that gives it away for free? Or the restaurant where you might die of a preventable disease because you’re poor?

Is the Canadian system of single-payer health coverage perfect? No. But it gets the job done while also ensuring that no one has to sacrifice their health just because they, say, wasted all their money building a rare Pog collection (for example). It’s efficient, far-reaching, and far from the “catastrophe” Mr. Trump would have you believe. Maybe if he’d come up to let us treat that sniffle, he could see that for himself.

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Ned Petrie (@NedPetrie) s a Toronto-based writer, actor and 6-time Canadian Comedy Award nominee. He’s the co-creator of the animated series Erik The Pillager (Adult Swim Canada) and Murder House (Mondo Media). Ned is also a regular contributor to The Beaverton and CBC Comedy. If you follow him on Twitter, you get a million dollars!

Special thanks to Klaus Schuller for contributing the funniest joke to this article. See if you can guess which one!