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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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).

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.

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