"...you would be hard-pressed to find many Canadians who are unhappy with the Canadian healthcare system, and "customer satisfaction" is the ultimate arbiter in this case.
....
having a healthy and educated population is so important to the "environment" of a community that if people don't realize that they should voluntarily support universal healthcare and education, I'm always surprised."
And I'm always surprised when liberals--who otherwise understand the ill effects of monopolies--are so enthusiastic about creating state-run monopolies for healthcare.
Canadians might well prefer their system to the US. But I don't think that tells us much about what the ideal system would be. Most people only experience one system.
I think if libertarians were allowed to implement their ideal system, both Canadians and Americans would prefer it, if they were allowed to experience it.
People have different preferences and priorities. I personally don't see much point in spending a lot of tax dollars on healthcare for old people (beyond palliative pain and comfort care). It doesn't buy much more life, and the life it does buy is poor quality.
I would much prefer to spend my money on anti-aging research, cryonics, and uploading research. That has the potential to vastly increase lifespan and number of healthy years. (As you well know.)
But I can't persuade the superstitious authoritarians around me of that. Nor can I persuade them to stop threatening to beat the shit out of me and put me in a cage if I refuse to give them money for their pet projects. (Which also include a bunch of actively destructive projects, rather than mere wastes of money, such as the Wars on Terror and Drugs).
Even if I were to agree that spending money to provide currently available healthcare was the best way to spend money, I wouldn't be subsidizing relatively healthy and wealthy North Americans.
I would be using it to subsidize people in much poorer countries, such as Papua New Guinea or Ghana, where each additional dollar of spending on healthcare provides much more benefit.
I would also end immigration suppression laws. Many people support immigration suppression precisely because they fear that would-be immigrants would overwhelm their socialist wealth transfer schemes. Yet being able to immigrate to the US can mean a 5-10 fold increase in lifetime earnings to immigrants, which could provide a vastly improved life on multiple dimensions (health, education, housing, etc).
Liberals often insinuate that libertarians are selfish and heartless. But libertarian policies would actually help the poorest people in the world much more than the nationalist policies of the socialist left.
From here: