One of the great hooks of modern music is Comin around again (Carly Simon, Arista, 1986). She celebrates both change and the fact that we seemingly have recurrence in our lives.
"I know nothing stays the sameBut if you're willing to play the gameIt's coming around again"
That hook, "It's coming around again," is infectious and compelling. The fact is that many life issues simply keep coming up; day after day, week after week, year after year. One of my favorites is the joy of single payer medicine. Oh, if only we could nationalize health care, all of our woes would be forever over.
See, e.g., Single Payer Questions (May 2016), Single-Payer Lessons from Vermont (July 2016); Single Payer, Outliers, and Conclusions (January 2018), Confusion and Disconnects in Medicine (July 2018), Medical Charges and Challenges (June 2019), Single Payer Redux (January 2022); In the end, Someone has to Pay (May 2016). Despite the assurances of Dire Straits, there simply is no "money for nothing" (AIR, 1985).
The idea of socialized medicine and single-payer struck me again with a recent headline from the Independent.
‘My husband spent two days on a trolley in overrun A&E – weeks later he died from a deadly brain infection’
The first thought, that he was on holiday, was erroneous. No, he did not spend two days riding about on a decorated bus.
In the British medical model, a socialistic single-payer model, the "A&E is Accident and Emergency. The "trolley" is more like a gurney, and the two days spent lying on one is unconscionable regardless of what medical payment model your jurisdiction has adopted.
The patient in this instance was "rushed through triage" and parked in a corridor. He was not provided "a vital MRI scan because it was the weekend." He was soon after diagnosed with encephalitis, and "by then, the damage had been done." The poor bloke died from the brain swelling they could not diagnose.
This example led the Independent to look at data from the socialized National Health Service. It concluded that "13% waited 12 hours to be seen, treated, or discharged" when they visited in January 2026.
Is the American waiting room better? More than likely, though, there are those moments when delay rules the day. I sat in an emergency room for four hours one night and eventually elected to defer. I returned the next morning, and the time invested from start to finish was two hours.
Part of that problem is demand. There is little service in the space between real emergency and routine care. See Shifting Medical Preferences (May 2019), Transparency for Efficacy (June 2019).
Part of the problem may be supply. See Physician Shortage July 2025), Simple Math is The Point (April 2025), Bid Day 2025 (April 2025).
Nonetheless, the simple point is that socialized medicine does not appear any more capable of dealing with the delays and denials. In fact, the much touted Canadian social medicine system has been shown to result in medication introduction "waits significantly longer than Americans and Europeans."
Worse, a Canadian seeking treatment wait following a general practitioner referral was 28.6 weeks in 2025. That is "a 195% increase" over the last 33 years. There are "bottlenecks for specialists, diagnostics, and surgeries."
Fox recently reported on a woman in Canada whose visit to an emergency room resulted in a two-hour wait in triage, followed by "another 10 to 12 hours before she was seen." That woman reportedly witnessed another "with a head wound, bleeding profusely ... (who) had to wait two hours before she was seen."
None of this means that either system is necessarily superior per se. Nonetheless, it suggests that all systems might improve. But as you lay on the "trolley" in the hallway waiting for a diagnostic test, there is merit in being able to obtain care and treatment.
The Canadian woman bemoaned the universal Canadian healthcare saying, "I would rather pay for my healthcare at this point and get treated fairly.
"It's coming around again."