Waiting 10 Days For An Ambulance — The Dark Side Of ‘Free’ Health Care

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show.

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One of the most common talking points you hear from the Left — and you’re going to hear it a lot heading into the midterms — is that America has terrible health care. We’re told that every civilized country in the world has universal, socialized medicine, and that we’re backward, retrograde, clinging to some barbaric capitalist system while enlightened Europeans enjoy cradle-to-grave care.

You hear it constantly: America is a disgrace. We need socialized medicine.

Now, before we go any further, let’s acknowledge something the Left rarely does: we already have a substantial amount of socialized medicine in this country. We have it for illegal aliens. We have it for the very poor. We have it for the elderly through Medicare. We have a massive social safety net.

But here’s the part they leave out: the only reason any of that works at all is because it’s sitting on top of a heavily capitalist health care system that funds the entire apparatus. The “free” part only functions because something productive underneath it is paying the bills.

Still, we’re told we should scrap the whole thing and go full European.

How about we take a little look at some of the socialist health care systems around the world? Let’s start with Europe.

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A horrifying story recently came out of the United Kingdom. According to The Daily Mail, a 97-year-old woman, Babette Burge, was found nearly dead on the floor of her home after being told she would have to wait ten days — ten days — for an ambulance. Not ten days for surgery. Ten days just to be transported to a hospital.

Just five days earlier, a paramedic from a local GP surgery had attended Ms Burge’s home to assess her condition and found that her leg was ‘shortened and rotated’ – a sign of a fractured hip.

She was nearly 100 years old, lying on the floor with a broken hip, and was told she’d need to wait ten days for an ambulance.

She was later discovered barely breathing. Then she died.

This is what we’re supposed to envy? “Everybody gets health care” in the UK — assuming you can get to the hospital. The catch is that no one comes to get you. Universal coverage is lovely in theory. In practice, however, if you can’t secure transportation, it doesn’t matter how free the surgery is.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a prominent Canadian writer — very much on the Left, by her own description — recently admitted something chilling. She said she was offered medical assistance in dying (MAID) instead of care.

I’m about as far left as you can get… but we do have problems with MAiD in Canada.

How do I know? It was “offered” to me in lieu of care.

I’m disabled, I was alone, my conditions expensive.

Yes I was allowed to say “No”, but no alternative care was offered.

That’s coercion. https://t.co/LvCWd55esk

— Kelly (@broadwaybabyto) February 22, 2026

Credit: @broadwaybabyto/X.com

That’s not compassion. That’s coercion.

And this isn’t an isolated anecdote. Canada has dramatically expanded medical assistance in dying, or MAID. In parts of Europe — particularly in countries like the Netherlands — similar policies are spreading. Elderly people, disabled people, chronically ill people, and even young people struggling with “seasonal depression” are increasingly being told that death is a “treatment option.”

Think about that.

In a system where the government is paying the bills, patients are not just patients — they’re line items. They’re costs. And when waitlists grow long and budgets grow tight, the incentives get dark very quickly. The cheapest patient is the one who isn’t there anymore.

On the one hand, American leftists insist we’re the only country in the civilized world without socialized medicine. On the other hand, you look at some of these “civilized” systems and see 97-year-olds waiting ten days for an ambulance and disabled citizens being nudged toward suicide because their care is expensive.

That’s not health care. That’s the opposite of health care.

Now, is the American system perfect? Of course not. It’s expensive. It’s complicated. It’s frustrating. But it is also the system that produces the vast majority of the world’s pharmaceutical innovation. It is the system that subsidizes global research and development. It is the system that people from all over the world come to when they need cutting-edge treatment.

It is not, however, a system where the government routinely suggests that you kill yourself because you’re inconvenient. There’s a reason that countries with fully socialized medicine struggle with wait times and rationing.

So before we swallow the talking point that America is uniquely cruel because we don’t have cradle-to-grave government medicine, it’s worth looking at what that actually looks like in practice. A nearly 100-year-old woman dying on the floor because no ambulance is available. A disabled Canadian writer being offered euthanasia in lieu of care.

Beware the supposedly greener grass on the other side of the fence. Especially when that fence is our northern border, separating us from the snow Mexicans.