How many people per capita become homeless from healthcare in US vs how many people die/suffer from long waiting times in Canada/socialized health systems?
Quite a lot for the first case apparently (see 1).
The U.S. had roughly 770,000 people experiencing homelessness in 2024. Even if one-third of cases involved medical debt as a contributing factor, that gives 200 homeless people per 100,000 residents with healthcare costs contributing to their fate.
And obviously way more affected if we expand from complete homelessness to a housing downgrade (e.g. from a nice home to renting some appartment or going to a trailer or some motel) to cover medical costs that would have been trivial elsewhere, and even more so for those.
As for "how many people die/suffer from long waiting times in Canada/socialized health systems?", we know in Canada e.g.: 15,474 deaths while waiting ≈ 38 deaths per 100,000 people per year. And that's dying while waiting, not dying because of the wait. A lot of them are heavily impacted/elderly etc and would have died anyway with or without procedure (and the wait time of some of those could be comparable to a typical US wait time, or be totally independent from the healthcare system, and based on e.g. donor list priority, etc.).
To contrast, this report (2) estimates around 200,000 deaths/year ≈ 59 deaths per 100,000 Americans from lack of access / insurance/access-related mortality.
In recent years about 40% of uninsured adults reported delaying, skipping, or not obtaining needed care or medication because of cost. Even among insured adults, about 8% reported doing so. Gallup found 38% of Americans said they or a family member postponed medical treatment because of cost in 2022, the highest level in its long-running survey.
Keep in mind that about 8.2% of the US population that's uninsured (compared to ~ 0 in Canada). And that's not counting the US under-insured, claim denials, and costs that exceed deductibles and annual limits that all heavily burden even the insured in the US. In fact most US citizens with medical debt ARE insured.
>you asked it as if implying it's an argument against "socialized insurance" as opposed to a mere question
And how did you come up with that conclusion? Are you reading minds? No, I genuinely asked to know, since many factors are important, there's no winner out of the gate.
But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be. Good day.
I didn't, the parent commenter did. I simply answered your question on why HE did it, and even said it your question was put "as if" it implied it, not that it necessarily implied it.
Of course one could also come with that conclusion from reading your lengthy comment at the start of the thread pissing on socialized healthcare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48581228 and trivially putting two and two together too.
>But since you showed you can't argue in good faith and need to start accusing people out of the gate, I'll leave the conversation here and let you be.
Of course you will. Conveniently frees you from having to take into account my sibling comment with numbers and references :)
