 dystopian time. There is a new report by the Commonwealth Fund and what they find is that the United States of America ranks dead last in both health care outcomes and overall spending when it comes to health care in the United States of America. Now what they say here is that there's a couple of reasons why some systems health care systems perform better than than ours so they provide universal coverage and remove most cost barriers. They invest in primary care systems to ensure that a high value services are equitably available in all communities to all people. They reduce administrative burdens that divert time efforts and spending from health improvement efforts and they invest in social services especially for children and working age adults. Now I just want to read a couple of paragraphs from this story because I think that most of us on the panel already know the fundamentals about American health care and how broken it is but this is from Jake Johnson of Common Dreams who's brilliant by the way. So basically using a range of criteria to evaluate the health care systems of 11 countries Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom and the United States the Commonwealth Fund's latest analysis shows that the U.S. once again ranks last on access to care administrative efficiency equity and care and health care outcomes. The lone bright spot for the for-profit U.S. health care system there is a bright spot according to the new report is in a category dubbed care process which includes measures of preventative care, safe care, coordinated care and engagement and patient preferences. So I mean there's some good right? There's no question our cruel for-profit health care system is broken representative primarily Jayapal chair of the congressional progressive caucus and lead house sponsor of the Medicare for all act of 2021 said in a response to the report. It's time to fix it Jayapal added it's time to guarantee health care as a human right it's time for Medicare for all. So what I want to do and I've done this on the program before I think the very first time I ever spoke with David though I asked like what's it like in Canada if you if you need to go to a doctor and I always want to like if I'm talking to someone who doesn't live in the United States I always encourage them to share their experience because I just I genuinely don't believe that our peers in America understand what we're missing. So we're going to David and then he about your health care stories because I think this is really important. Yeah so the first thing I always tell Americans is that I never think about health care and that's the biggest benefit of having a single pair of system is you just never think like there's no reason to think about health care unless you need it. So and when I need it if I need to go to the doctor I we all get a health card you walk in you show your health card they you know they check the computer you go in and then you go home like that's the entire process and so it it's it's and I should be clear here I mean Canada ranked second last on that list for a good reason we don't cover dental care we don't cover pharma care home care isn't covered long-term care like retirement homes aren't covered so there are serious gaps in our system for sure but it's because our system doesn't go far enough so in fact Bernie's Medicare for all plan if enacted would go further than the Canadian health care system so there's definitely downsides to our system because it doesn't go far enough but just basic you know basic care going to your your your family doctor is a very simple streamline process I had surgery once same thing I mean it was booked it wasn't a you know a um anything urgent so it was booked three months ahead of time I went on the day I walk in again show my health card they they bring me in add the surgery I came home there's no you know on the phone with insurance companies none of that's going on it's all just covered all free and the only time I ever had to actually pay for health care is is for prescriptions but they're always I mean at least in in my case they've always been you know miniscule like you know 20 bucks for a month of medication for something but you know other people have had you know worse stories in Canada with pharma care because they have a lot more to pay for so it's different depending on your experience but um yeah I mean the biggest benefit is you just never think about it yeah I'm curious heme and this is kind of hard to assess but in the event there were you know there was a party if um I don't know the Liberals in Canada they proposed an American based health care system a private model how do you think that would go over in Canada even the conservatives here don't push for that kind of model and even in the UK too they couldn't they'll push for like maybe defunding it a little bit but it's so popular here that and it started on a provincial level and then spread across the rest of the country and it's never looked back since um and it will I don't think it'll ever changed hopefully fingers crossed I will say um I'll David brought up some amazing things not worrying is a huge one um just to give a little insight about my experience so I do cancer research for my phd and um and I have family members that are in health care and one thing that's very important to point out and to push back on uh people who are anti um universal health care is to mention that they're still incentive for doctors to make money so how it works is when David shows up to his to the office with his health card at the doctor just the the secretary whatever will scan his card or his code and his number and they will build the government so the doctors are actually private contractors a lot of the time and so they can work as much or as little as they want and make as much or as little money as they want um most of our doctors here aren't actually publicly employed uh employees so here in Ontario we have a list that we publish every year called the sunshine list which is like people who make over a hundred thousand dollars a year and work in the public sector so it could be like energy workers police officers things like this and very few doctors are actually on this list very very few like radiologists and stuff that are employed by the hospital but other than that most doctors run a private practice so that's the one thing that I think is um is a nice benefit that Canada has maybe over the UK because we have we still have the incentivization that people always rip on and say like oh who's gonna want to become a doctor right so that's one thing um the other thing I will say is uh like David said I have had the similar uh experience one day I woke up and I had extreme pain in my back I went to the emergency room I got surgery that night so it's not like this long wait time fucking craziest thing in the world like most places in the world they just triage you based on how bad you need care if you show up and you're gushing blood they're not going to be like okay you have to wait seven hours like I don't understand this caricature that people make sometimes like and and and I've heard I don't know maybe I've seen I've heard David make this or maybe Kyle Kalinsky where they say in America you triage too you just triage based off of who's got the money or who's got the coverage right and one last thing on this is as we learn more about medicine we realize how important preventative care and early diagnosis is your outcomes if you get prostate cancer at stage one diagnosed versus stage four diagnosed are worlds apart right when it comes to mortality rates five year ten year mortality rates the sooner you can uh detect these things the better outcomes you have the less it's going to cost the entire system down the line it's much easier to do a quick uh surgery or radiation on a small tumor versus like multiple rounds of chemotherapy because now the cancer is metastasized all over your body so it's another really important point is the fact that in America right now you have people who will get a little bump on their arm or in their breast but they'll be too scared to go to the doctor they'll put it off put it off put it no it's not that bad it's not that bad i don't want to pay the copay i don't want to pay the and then it's too late right so that's another massive thing and uh i think i touched on the things i wanted to touch on and i think there was one other thing but i forgot for now um yeah that's amazing yeah i yeah i i love i think that you're like you guys sharing your experiences is really really crucial because i don't know if sarah and donna have the same experiences as me but people are genuinely afraid of the prospect of universal health care here people that i've talked to even family members because they feel as if it's you know it's it's foreign first of all right it's literally a foreign concept because we don't have that here but i try to make it more familiar right i talk about uh medicare medicare like these types of programs that have existed in the united states that are loved um you know if you're a veteran in the united states you kind of have a version of of you know um universal health care so trying to like make it seem less foreign and more familiar is important and like getting canadians and british people to weigh in i think is honestly one of the most historically effective it's so effective yeah good good on you yeah mike i have a story i'd love to share with you to give contrast to this sure so uh a lot of people don't know about this but when i was a kid i lived in new zealand my dad is a scientist and he was doing research there and so my mom tells me the story and i contrasted with what happened to her during 2019 christmas and here's here's what happened my mom had one of my siblings in a c-section and not only is everything you know completely paid for at you know point of service which means you're not paying anything out of pocket after she had the c-section she was sent home and she was also sent home with a helper that came in every day to help her with certain things move certain things around because when you have a c-section for several months you're not allowed to lift heavy things and so um this is health care in new zealand okay health care in new zealand now contrast it with this with the united states christmas the day on christmas eve my mom hurt her knee while she was climbing up the stairs and we took her into you know an orthopedic care place and there is a right when we go in there the doctor came in looked at it says we need to do an MRI and i said that's great there's this huge window there's a big MRI machine here i was very happy let's go do it and you know he was like okay let me go get the setup and then they come back 30 minutes later you know how they make you sit in the room forever and ever and they say well the doctor's in network but the MRI machine is not oh i didn't know the MRI machine didn't take its licensing test i kid you not i think that was the day i was like you gotta be kidding me because she can't walk she hurt her knees wow and and you know what's crazy you bring up MRI machine i i went to a patient's chart like i think two weeks ago you would not believe one patient had 70 different treatments imaging MRI pet scan CT scan radiation chemotherapy imagine if all of these things fell on the shoulder of one person to have to financially pay for or even pay partially for right it's like unfathomable and that's and again you saw on the last topic i'm kind of like uh maybe not as left as some of you guys are on some like economic issues but on this one issue when it comes to health care because of the cost that because of the burden that it has on one person the cost has to be spread around and that's why i'm super pro universal health care because that cost has to has to has to get spread around and like you said the MRI machine being out of network david and i have never had to worry about you could go anywhere in the country get falls fall sick and that's right right david like even though we have oh hip we can get sick in any province yeah it's still i think it's still transfers yeah and i forgot to mention i mean i had a kid six months ago so and we were thank you and we were we had to be in the hospital for you know a couple of extra days and then most people do in that process and still like you know of course no bill nothing that they took care of us great and it's just we go home and we have our child and there's no worried about we're not worried about you know the bills or anything it's it's it's peace of mind that universal health care gives you that you know americans really have to understand that yeah and even if you have insurance that doesn't necessarily mean that you're like protected because my dad was a veteran so he basically had universal health care but there were ambulance rides that he took he'd go to hospitals that weren't the va's hospitals but then you know there it could be covered by medicaid and so there's a lot of overlap but then there's a lot of parts that are left out so like after my dad passed away last year my mom got bill after bill after bill and it's probably about 80 to a hundred thousand dollars worth of medical bills and in terms of like which one she has to actually pay she's like i have no idea um i don't know if these bills are actually covered by insurance the ones that we that we have or the va but but you get them anyway and it's kind of like this well you know you cross your fingers and hope that you don't you don't get sued your social security doesn't get you know garnished it's it's so even like even if you're covered there's still like that peace of mind in america is just it's not there and it's it's it's bizarre sarah have you have the same conversations that i've had where people genuinely feel frightened by the prospect of universal health care so i well we all say that we're the worst but i say we're first worst so we're number one at the worst health care good for us we did in america great again um so i've had like i grew up with my dad's from the uk so like he had universal health care has always been like a thing in my house my dad's like i don't understand why we don't just have universal health care because he grew up with it and i've run into it we're like people don't it's so misrepresented that they're like oh but it's gonna cause like taxes and i like the freedom of choice that i have and i don't want to lose my doctor and i don't want to lose my network because they all have this like weird envisioned like moment that like and it says a lot about both veterans care that i feel like people have this and a lot about american health care they feel like they're gonna be corralled and forced to go like a va hospital instead of their regular doctor and like first of all that says a lot about what you think about veterans care second of all um that's just it just isn't the case like the choice doesn't change like it's you're still going to have access to whoever you want to go to like you're all the doctors become a network like i watched my my buddy was like trying to find a general practitioner and he spent like two weeks calling and calling and calling trying to find someone in network and they were all like it'd say yes for part but no for other parts and like it took him two weeks to find a general practitioner and like i have to explain to people do you really think that's like better than being able to call any doctor and go and not have to worry about it and think about it like you rather call like 900 providers and like i had a health care story too so i had um a health health care when i was um i think it was before i was running um but i started having this like colossal like sharp pain that started the back of my head and it just like spread to the point was like debilitating like i couldn't walk and i couldn't breathe um so we called ambulance and ambulance came and took me away um to get from my house at the time to get to the get to get to the emergency room entrance was less than half a mile it was like a third of a mile it was a 940 dollar ambulance bill to go a third of a mile and my insurance was like we did cover part of it they covered it apparently 900 was the bill for me to pay the total bill was like three thousand dollars and like utterly ridiculous nonsense and so when i hear this and i hear people like talking about health care and they're so afraid of health care costs i'm like what if like imagine a world where you're like oh wow i feel this weird pain in my neck and you don't have to write it out you can just go to any doctor and it's covered and then we all move on