Do you have any citations for this? I've heard this rhetoric before, but every time I look into it, searching around for studies on google scholar or the web, I can only find studies and reports indicating that health outcomes trend better in countries with more universal coverage. There are think pieces with anecdata of course, but no actual peer reviewed publications I can find.
Heck when I went to college in Ohio's capital, the recommendation on how to get psychiatry or therapy as a new patient was to call the suicide helpline and claim that you were suicidal. That would get you a new patient appointment within 72 hours versus over 3 months on average for patients looking to get into care through normal channels.
The US maintains the highest hardware capacity of the three nations with roughly 43 scanners per million people and performs around 245 to 290 scans per 1,000 residents per year. non-emergency wait times are 1 to 7 days. The UK has 10 scanners per million people and ~100 scans per 1,000 residents, using centralized triage to keep non-emergency wait times between 1 and 6 weeks for NHS targets. Canada does 160 scans per 1,000 residents and 14 to 15 scanners per million, with wait times of 5 to 9 weeks.
When you consider that the US population is not fully covered by insurance, the number of scans is even higher
> Among patients undergoing cancer surgery, waiting times to initiation of first-course therapy have steadily increased since 2012, particularly at high-volume academic centers and among patients referred for definitive care. With continued consolidation and expansion of health systems, system-level strategies are urgently needed to monitor and mitigate delays in the delivery of surgical care for cancer.
> Delays were more pronounced at academic compared with community hospitals and among patients referred for care. Predictors of longer waiting time included Medicaid insurance (5 of 6 cancers), lowest-quartile income (6 of 6 cancers), Black race (5 of 6 cancers), increased travel distance (4 of 6 cancers), care in the West region (6 of 6 cancers), and treatment at academic institutions (6 of 6 cancers). Receipt of robotic operations was linked with longer waiting times for nonbreast malignancies (5 of 5 cancers).
Why would I want to trade my top tier private insurance for that?