The for-profit health care industry spends enormous amounts of time and money trying to convince us that Canada's overwhelmingly popular single-payer health care system (i.e. socialism) is worse than ours.

For instance, just look at the tens of thousands of Canadians coming to the U.S. for health care every year.



The Fraser Institute, a Canadian public policy think tank, estimates that 52,513 Canadians received non-emergency medical treatment in the U.S. and other countries in 2014, a 25 percent jump from the roughly 41,838 who sought medical care abroad the previous year.

In citing those numbers in its 2015 report, "Leaving Canada for Medical Care," the organization said difficulties in obtaining timely medical care at home is, increasingly, leading Canadians to seek it abroad.

Those are real numbers. Wait times for elective procedures are very long in Canada.

However, the numbers mean nothing unless you can compare them to something for context.

Fortunately it isn't hard to find a comparison. Just look south.



An estimated 952,000 Californians enter Mexico to receive health care annually, including prescription drugs, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Nearly a million Californians - just Californians - go to Mexico every year for health care needs. That's more in one month than all the Canadians going to America in a full year.

Context changes everything.

What's that got to do with universal single-payer health care?

Five years ago, Mexico, a still developing nation, achieved universal health care.



Despite periods of economic downturns and crisis, Mexico recently achieved a significant milestone – enrolling 52.6 million previously uninsured Mexicans in public medical insurance programs and thereby achieving universal health coverage in less than a decade.

...According to Knaul, as of April this year “every Mexican, regardless of their socioeconomic situation, has access to the financial protection in health that shields them from facing the terrible choice between impoverishment and suffering or even death.”

“Mexico devised and implemented a reform and then demonstrated, with evidence, how a large, middle-income country can transform its health system and successfully achieve universal health coverage in one decade,” said Minister Chertorivski, an alum of Harvard Kennedy School and a participant in the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Forum, which convened for the first time in June.

Let's stop to take this in: Around a million Americans flee the United States every year to get health care in a country with a socialist single-payer health care system.

Let's see Republicans talk about that.

That's not to say Mexico's health care system isn't without serious flaws.

It is a developing nation, after all. But then in some ways, so are we.



Life expectancy at birth will continue to climb substantially for residents of industrialized nations — but not in the United States, where minimal gains will soon put life spans on par with those in Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to an extensive analysis released Tuesday.

No examination of this issue is complete without doing a full comparison.



Seguro Popular provides unemployed and poor Mexicans with access to preventative healthcare services such as diabetes screening and vaccinations, as well as treatment for chronic and severe illnesses.

Enrollees don’t have to pay a fee at the time of the doctor visit.

The program is supported by a mix of federal and state funds — similar to how the Medicaid program for low-income Americans is funded.

The poorest families pay nothing to join Seguro Popular. The rest pay a premium based on their income.

...

In the past 10 years, the number of Mexicans who experienced “impoverishing” health care costs fell from 3.3 percent to 0.8 percent. A similar rating isn’t listed for the United States. But a CDC survey found that in 2016, 16 percent of Americans under 65 years old were parts of families that had trouble paying their medical bills.

The United States is literally surrounded by socialist single-payer universal health care: Mexico, Canada, Russia, and Cuba.

And Americans are already voting for single-payer with their wallets and their feet.