I would like to clarify a part of your commentary for the sake of our liberal audience:

Yes, a Canadian may be “guaranteed” care, and it may be provided for “free,” that is, by compulsory taxation, but guaranteed care does not mean timely, effective, care that reduces suffering and raises quality of life.

The Canadian system or most other socialist systems don’t even pretend to guarantee care, although many U.S. liberals would like everyone to believe they do.

Those systems do however, guarantee coverage, and hence the confusion.

However, the guarantee of coverage is practically meaningless.

To take an extreme example, we could guarantee health coverage for all residents in the United States for a mere $300 million provided that the coverage is only good for a maximum of $1 per person spent on health care. This would then be guaranteed coverage, but with almost no care provided. And that’s the distinction!

This may be a simplified extreme example, but as evident by the article featured here, denial of care (postponement is the same as denial) is quite common in socialist health care systems, despite the guarantee of coverage.