What socialized medicine really looks like

OPINION:

Most younger voters are rooting for a socialist president in the 2028 election, according to a new poll. In addition, more than three-quarters of voters younger than 40 believe that major industries such as health care, energy and Big Tech should be nationalized “to give more control and equity to the people.”

They might want to take a look at what socialized health care is doing to people in Britain, Canada and France. The state-run systems in these countries are forcing people to endure months- or yearslong waits for critical care. In many cases, they are denying treatment altogether.

Today, 6 million British residents are waiting for treatment. Half of them have not received any care since getting on the list.

The conditions in many British hospitals can be described only as barbaric. A report published this year by the Royal College of Nursing included accounts from front-line nurses forced to grapple with the nation’s “corridor crisis,” the now common practice of treating patients in cramped hallways because of a lack of space.

As one nurse related, “The other day I was looking after an elderly gentleman with acute hernia rupture. In a corridor for hours, vomiting. … This is a daily occurrence.” Another nurse described how a “patient died in the corridor but wasn’t discovered for hours.”

Even gaining access to a National Health Service hospital can be excruciating. This month, an 84-year-old man was forced to wait in the back of an ambulance for 11 hours because the hospital where he had been taken had no room for him.

As of October 2022, Britain’s public insurance system paid for just 48% of the medicines launched worldwide from 2012 through 2021. Britons routinely find that novel medicines that could ease their suffering are simply not available in their country.

Sadly, lengthy delays and undignified treatment aren’t unique to Britain’s socialized health care system.

Canada’s single-payer health care program is so mismanaged and underresourced that the median wait for receiving care from a specialist after referral by a general practitioner reached 30 weeks, more than six months, in 2024. That was more than triple the wait in 1993.

More than 1 in 6 Canadians lack a care provider such as a family doctor or nurse practitioner, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. This shortage of regular care is straining the country’s hospitals. An estimate that 1 in 7 emergency room visits are for conditions that could have potentially been treated in a primary care setting.

Canadian media have reported that people are being encouraged to opt for medically assisted suicide rather than treatment.

The abysmal working conditions in France’s government-run hospitals have led to a series of tragic suicides among health care workers in that country. The 19 families of those workers have since sued the nation’s health minister, among others, accusing them of “moral harassment and manslaughter.”

These are not accidental features of certain single-payer health care systems. They are the inevitable consequences of socialized medicine. When states attempt to administer entire sectors of the economy, health care among them, from the top down, shortages, rationing and dysfunction are impossible to avoid.

The United States has escaped such bleak outcomes by continuing to rely on a relatively market-based approach to paying for and delivering health care. If given the option, many people living under socialized systems abroad would gladly decamp to a private-sector alternative.

Many already have. Last year alone, a record number of cancer patients in Britain, 95,885 in all, sought care at a private hospital rather than endure the depravity of their government-run system.

There’s no shortage of victims of single-payer health care in Canada, Britain and continental Europe. Americans enthusiastic about importing socialized medicine should take a close look at the many people waiting, suffering and even dying for want of care that we take for granted here in the United States.

• Sally C. Pipes is president, CEO and Thomas W. Smith fellow in health care policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is “The World’s Medicine Chest: How America Achieved Pharmaceutical Supremacy — and How to Keep It” (Encounter 2025). Follow her on X @sallypipes.