The Middle Column
No side. Just the record.
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Brief MC-0006 · Version 2.0 draft
Filed under: Health care. Entered by the Clerk. Stamped: record checked, October 26, 2026.
“Medicare for all is not for America. Look at Canada and the U.K. Their medical process is horrible.”
Quoted exactly as posted, October 2026.
Canada and Britain cover everyone, nobody receives a bill when they are treated, the systems spend roughly half per person what the United States spends, and the public in those countries still supports the model.
This claim circulates in many wordings, so it is stated in its common form, without quotation marks. Quotation marks in this brief mean exact, sourced words.
What follows is the record underneath both claims.
The record, in brief: The waiting times in Canada and England are real, they are documented in the systems' own published figures, and they have been getting worse. The same systems cover every resident, charge nothing at the point of care, and spend roughly half per person what the United States spends, and the British public records deep dissatisfaction with the performance of its system alongside firm attachment to the model itself.
What is true in the first claim: timeliness in Canada and England is poor by the published numbers, and Canada's median wait is the longest its recorded series has produced.
What is true in the second claim: coverage in both systems is universal, bills at the point of care are zero, and spending per person is roughly half the United States figure.
The first claim is quoted word for word from a statement posted in October 2026, and the spelling and punctuation are the writer's own, because a quotation in this brief is a promise that the words are exact. The full statement reads: "Medicare for all is not for America. Look at Canada and the U.K. Their medical process is horrible. Another example is the Veterans medical. Or look at the Indian Reservation. Absolutely horrible." The statement also names the Veterans medical system and the Indian Reservation, and those are different systems with different records, so this brief checks the Canada and the U.K. part of the statement, which is the part the figures below cover. The second claim is stated in its common form, because it circulates in many wordings and no single person's sentence can honestly be quoted for it. This brief checks both claims against the record, figure by figure, and then leaves the part that is genuinely debatable where it belongs, which is with the reader.
Underneath both claims sits a trade-off, and it is how a health system limits care. A system that covers everyone and charges nothing at the point of care rations by queue, and a system that charges at the point of care rations by price, and every system does one of these or a designed mix of the two. The first claim rests on the premise that the queue is the measure of the whole system. The second claim rests on the premise that coverage, cost, and public support are the measures that matter. Whether the trade these systems make is acceptable is a question about values and design, and reasonable people answer it differently. How long the queue is, what the coverage is, and what the public says about its own system are not values questions. Those are in the record, and the record is below.
The first claim holds on the waiting times themselves, because the figures are the systems' own published numbers and they are at full strength in the record above. Canada's median wait of 30.0 weeks is the longest its series has recorded, the trend runs across three decades, and England's list holds 7.37 million treatments. The claim also holds in its underlying warning, because CBO's single-payer modeling flags the same failure mode for a United States design, with demand rising faster than supply at zero cost-sharing. The claim breaks where one dimension is asked to carry a judgment about the whole system, because the same record that documents the waits documents universal coverage at roughly half the per-person cost, and it documents a British public that wants the model kept and the performance fixed. The cited data carries the word "slow" precisely, and it does not carry a whole-system verdict on its own.
The second claim holds on coverage, because both systems cover every resident, and it holds on cost, because both spend roughly half per person what the United States spends, and it holds on public support, because the British figures record attachment to the model at 89% for free at the point of use, 81% for tax-funded, and 74% for available to everyone, recorded in the same survey that put satisfaction at 26%. The claim breaks where coverage is offered as an answer to the queue, because the two facts sit in the record side by side and neither one moves the other. Thirty weeks is the longest median Canada has recorded, and England's 7.37 million treatments waiting is a count, and universal coverage does not shorten a single one of those waits.
Strip both claims down and they describe the same two systems from different ends. The waits are long and documented. The coverage is universal and documented. The spending is roughly half, and the public attachment is recorded in the same surveys as the public dissatisfaction. Every system limits care somehow, and the shared ground under both claims is that the limit in these systems is time, while the limit in the United States system is mostly price. Which limit a society should choose is the actual debate, and it cannot be settled by a dataset, including this one.
30.0 weeks. The first claim, taken at full strength, treats this figure as the whole story of two health systems. The second claim, taken at full strength, proceeds as though the figure does not have to be answered. The Fraser Institute measured the figure, and the measured figure is 30.0 weeks, and it sits inside a record that also contains universal coverage, $0 bills at the point of care, and spending at roughly half the United States level.
The factual part is already settled, because both halves of it are documented above, and no further evidence is needed to establish how long the waits are or what the coverage is. What the record cannot settle is which rationing mechanism a society should choose, by queue, by price, or by a designed mix, and it cannot settle how much timeliness a system owes its patients. Those are values and design questions. They belong to the reader, and they are real ones.
The Fraser Institute's median combines specialties and provinces with wide variation, and some provinces and procedures are far faster while others are slower. The NHS figures in this brief are for England, not for the whole United Kingdom.
Fraser Institute, Waiting Your Turn 2024 · NHS England waiting list statistics (Aug 2026), as reported · British Social Attitudes 2025 · CMS National Health Expenditure data, 2024 · CBO single-payer analysis (congestion). Receipt Pack MC-0006 available on request.
You can debate what to do about the facts here. The facts are not the debate.