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Comment by daveFNbuck | Hacker News Reader

These countries all have at least 10x the population density of the US. I'm not sure about healthcare, but the rest of your list gets cheaper as population density increases.

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And the US has 10x the population density of Canada. Yet we manage it somehow (except for internet). I love how the US is simultaneously the most powerful economy in the world and completely hapless at putting any of that to use for the good of its citizens.

To be fair, the vast majority of Canadians live near Canada's southern border.

To be fair, it's cold up north...

For sure. It's not a mystery why people would rather live in Toronto than Yellowknife. But it does mean that low population density is in some sense mostly on paper.

My main point is not that providing quality public services is easy but that excuses like "we don't have enough population density" are a red herring. The real hurdles are entirely political.

Some back of the envelope calculations:

Length of US/Canada border: 8,890km [1] Population of Canada: 36,708,083 [2]

Assuming ALL of Canada's population lives within 100km of this border a rough estimate of this area might be 889,000km^2 giving a population density of 41 people per square kilometre. This conservative estimate is in the same ballpark as the US population density of 33 people per square kilometre [3] with the caveat that this population is spread across a long, thin 9000 km ribbon increasing the cost of roads and any other infrastructure versus the US's more favourable shape. And let's not forget that Canada's GDP per capita is $46,437 while America's is $57,467 [4]. This is a factor of 1.24 in favour of the United States.

Given all this, why is the US incapable of providing the kind of single-payer healthcare that Canada does to its population?

[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-402-x/2012000/chap/geo/geo-...

[2] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/f...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

It isn't but I thought we were talking about infrastructure (there are clearly political factors at work there too of course).

Fine, we are talking about the trhee main urban centers of the US here - not the whole country. Now that this strawman is out of the way- are we allowed to continue?

No. You don’t get to wire up NYC at the expense of all taxpayers.

NYC pays far more in both state and federal taxes than it receives in services. NY State pays far more in federal taxes than it receives in services. Rural parts of the US receive far more in services than they pay in taxes.

The rest of the country isn't paying for a thing in NYC - it's the other way around. Just leave us more of our own tax money and we could do all sorts of things that aren't currently considered possible.

> Just leave us more of our own tax money and we could do all sorts of things that aren't currently considered possible.

At (roughly) what number of people does that argument stop working? 5M? 500K? 50K? 5?

I'm not clear on what it is you're asking.

I don't think that's a strawman. Roads and internet have to reach everyone in the country, not just major urban areas. The money for these projects comes from people in major urban areas too.

You make a good point about policing. Density wouldn't explain why policing in Tokyo is better and cheaper than in New York.

In the case of healthcare it's because the US is alone in the degree to which its system is privatized.

I agree that this is a major factor for the US, but as a point of clarification, empirically (based on other countries) there seems to be a degree of privatization that increases efficiency.

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