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The United States’ comprehensively botched response to COVID-19 has brought on an outburst of pride and relief north of the border. Social media is full of grateful stories about seamless hip replacements, vanquished tumours, and all sorts of other modern medical miracles performed in properly run hospitals that don’t leave any of their patients financially crippled.

It makes for very frustrating reading.

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That every citizen should receive swift, expert, compassionate medical care at or near zero out-of-pocket cost is a bedrock assumption of every developed country in the world except the one to which we happen to live next door. If we somehow didn’t live next door to that system, Canada’s healthcare conversations would be very different.

The notion that any private-sector service delivery or extra “tier” sends us hurtling down a sewer toward “American-style healthcare” would be considered absurd. These are common features of other very high-functioning healthcare systems. And we would likely focus more on the fact that, relative to similar healthcare systems, ours is more than anything else average.