The healthcare system in the United States continues to be deeply broken. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from reports such as one in The Washington Post describing Americans road-tripping to Canada to purchase vitally needed insulin so that they or their family members do not die: “’It felt like we were robbing the pharmacy,’ said Quinn Nystrom, a Type 1 diabetic who joined the caravan that day. ‘It had been years since I had 10 vials in my hands.’”
Across the northern border, analog insulin, used by Type 1 diabetics, costs one-tenth of what it costs in the United States and can be purchased without a prescription because, for the love of God, it is not bloody likely that anyone will be purchasing insulin for recreational reasons. There is no guesswork required about what your consumer-beloved health insurance company will pay or whether it will pay a different amount the following month; there are no hours-long telephone marathons fighting for invisible rebates offered only to some patients only during some phases of the moon. Diabetics do not have to ration the insulin they manage to afford, risking death while attempting to scrape up enough money for the next inflated bill.
And all this makes U.S. claims of having the "best healthcare system in the world" look like a cheap joke aimed, as usual, at any patient who has the gall to complain.
None of this nonsense is necessary. Nations can take basic, common-sense, and/or "socialist" actions to rein in healthcare costs, from government negotiation of prescription pricing to universal insurance that eliminates the grotesque, fevered drives of insurers to squeeze maximum profit from citizens and, if they are sick, to most efficiently cull them from the rolls. A common medication required by 7.5 million Americas should not be mysteriously skyrocketing in price to unsustainable levels. Patients with common and treatable medical conditions should not be obliged to choose between death and financial ruin. Pulling the private health insurance industry out of the American market root and branch and replacing it with a single card without network boundaries—with one form for each doctor's office to fill out according to a single set of rules, instead of endless variations—would slash healthcare costs overnight.
The notion that the current system is working is plausible only to Americans who have never needed to use it.
In the meantime, caravans of Americans are crossing the border to Canada, medical refugees seeking asylum from an American healthcare system that has gone haywire. The group highlighted by The Washington Post is planning another run this month, this one an organized tour ending in London, Ontario, where insulin co-discoverer Fredrick Banting was based nearly 100 actual damn years ago. A hundred years later, this nation is still professing to be baffled as to how we can possibly get the price of the stuff down to what every other developed nation on the planet has managed.