Nick Freitas: What happens when ‘free’ health care comes with a 16-hour wait?

Americans are often told that Canada's health care system is proof that universal coverage works. Nick Freitas wants to know: at what cost?

And the filmmakers behind "Broken Country" have the answer.

“What do we tell our barista at Starbucks when they tell us that we just don’t understand how wonderful it could be if we had a Canadian-style system, that all of a sudden you would get free health care and whether or not you live or die would no longer be determined based off of how much money you made because up there they really care about everybody,” Freitas asks Mira Metter and Mike Werry.

“The first sort of misconception is that it is free. It comes out of taxation, right? It comes primarily out of personal income tax. And to the average Canadian family of four, it’s roughly $18,000 a year for just health care out of taxes,” Metter tells Freitas.

“The second one is that you might not pay at the front desk with the nurse when you go to receive any level of care, but you pay with how long you’re waiting for that care and the impacts along the way,” she continues.

Metter had her own experience in the Canadian ER when her doctor sent her there to get same-day blood tests. She was there for 14 hours and recalls being “absolutely horrified watching senior citizens dying in gurneys in the hall.”

“People coming in from all walks with all sorts of levels of severity just sitting around waiting, bleeding, you know, in agony for hours and hours and hours on end, and that in itself has major implications,” she explains.

"So when you look at a health care system and think it’s so ideal, is it ideal because you’re not paying for it at point of purchase, or is it ideal because you don’t see that payment but you’re paying with prolonged issues due to wait times?” she adds.

In their film, she recalls interviewing a man who slipped and fell on ice and had to wait 18 hours in the hospital to be seen.

“It became a permanent disability that caused severe pain. And that costs so much more than whatever sort of paid insurance plan would actually be,” she says.

“Is this really descriptive of the system?” Freitas asks.

“It’s universal,” Werry answers, adding, “Average wait times at hospitals in Canada are about 16 hours.”

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