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Comment by excannuk | Hacker News Reader

No, that's illegal. Thats what single payer means, only one payer is allowed [1].

Is meant to encourage rich people to support the health system since everyone's in it. But in reality the very wealthy go to Buffalo and immigrants visit their home countries.

It's also not lost on public policy experts that MAID has the potential of "solving" a lot of structural problems in Canadian health care and... long and behold MAID has expanded tremendously in ten years.

[1] with some exceptions largely grandfathered in

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That's not what single payer actually means, since Australia has both a single payer public system and a separate private system. The part that allows these to both exist is that the public system has vast resources (i.e. an entire national/set of state governments) that can act as one for immense negotiating power. This does not preclude a private system from existing.

Legal definitions vary from legal jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and in Canada?

That's what it means. In Australia it can mean something different.

It's not meant to "encourage the rich to support" the health system, it's meant to avoid completely gutting the public health system by creating a parallel pay-for-play system where only the richest pay and subsequently suck up all of the already finite resources and talent.

Introducing parallel private health care is just accelerationism for privatization wonks who want to just see the death of universal healthcare by sucking it dry for those willing to pay.

There's no magic wand with the resources available for healthcare. Creating private systems so rich people can skip the line doesnt magically create that capability, it means taking that capability from someone who maybe needed it more in the public side of things.

In most other contexts, rich people being able to spend money for some good or service would simply induce more supply ultimately making the product cheaper and better for the masses as well. The rich get to be "early adopters" buying a product when it's expensive and not very good; the poor as "late adopters" get to buy a product that is cheaper and works better once the bugs have been worked out. So...why exactly are resources and talent considered "finite" when it comes to health care and shouldn't we maybe look at FIXING that rather than take it for granted?

Consider, say, food distribution: McDonalds has traditionally made far more money as a private business catering to the tastes of the poor and middle-class than any fancy restaurant ever made catering to the rich. Do fancy restaurants like Per Se "suck up all the resources" needed to cook and serve food? Does the existence of fancy restaurants hurt McDonald's by making it harder to find burger-flippers? And does McDonalds in turn "suck up all the resources" thereby making it harder for people in some other context to find and acquire food? If not, what makes healthcare so different?

Not comparable.

If there were a limited number of licensed cooks like there are doctors, it would be far different.

Not how it works in the UK, everyone pays into public single-payer healthcare, but you’re free to buy your own private healthcare on top if you like.

Medical imaging and diagnostic testing is one of services allowed by private healthcare in Canada.

> Diagnostic Testing: Private labs and clinics provide quicker access to diagnostic tests such as MRI scans, blood tests, and X-rays, which can expedite treatment plans.

https://schwartzcohenlaw.com/does-canada-offer-private-healt...

There are private clinics like Medcan, which you can pay for checkups, referrals, etc., so it's not all single payer. You usually end up in the same queue for MRIs though, so it doesn't help there.

> But in reality the very wealthy go to Buffalo

This has to be a brand new sentence (post 1950s anyway).

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