As someone who broadly prefers the Canadian healthcare system to the American one, and would prefer to see American healthcare move in a Canadian direction, I find a lot of arguments based on the superiority of the Canadian system pretty ignorant, particularly the assertion that unlike Americans, Canadians never have to go without healthcare. Canadians go without healthcare all the time. It's just that the mix of people going without healthcare (mostly people with chronic conditions and painful but non-life threatening issues) is different than America.
There are some very serious trade offs and issues with single payer systems like Canada and the UK, but I find the pro-single payer side doesn't seem interested in addressing them, or in many cases, even aware of them at all.
Is there a reason people with chronic conditions tend to have to go without healthcare in Canada?
There are shortages of healthcare either due to lack of personnel in a given area or lack of funds. This forces the available personnel to ration their resources, which means focusing on acute and/or life threatening conditions.
E.g. There's a shortage of orthopedic surgeons in Nova Scotia. They do knee replacements but those go on the backburner as doing without a knee replacement, while very painful, won't kill you. Consequently, it takes about two years to get a knee replaced in my province.
