Recently, a liberal think-tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP), issued a policy paper that promised the truth on waiting times in government-run health systems. If you want the truth about the issue, however, youll have to wait a long time for it if you choose to rely on CAPs disingenuous analysis.

The CAP report cherry-picks facts to try to make an argument that a single-payer health-care system wont result in rationing of health care. Unfortunately, however, even supporters of single payer have admitted that government-run care will increase waiting times for care.

CAPs paper starts out by criticizing President Trump and other conservative groups, who have asserted that a single-payer system would lead to massive wait times for treatments and destroy access to quality care, as Trump stated in his recent executive order on Medicare. CAP calls these assertions false, and then claims:

Patients in peer nations generally have similar or shorter wait times than patients in the United States for a variety of services, refuting the argument that universal coverage would necessarily result in longer wait times in the future. [Emphasis added.]

The above sentence, like the rest of the paper, uses clever semantic wordplay to obscure the issue. CAP claims that universal coverage wouldnt necessarily result in longer wait times, but Trump and the right-leaning groups have criticized one specific form of universal coveragesingle payer, in which the government serves as the sole funder of health care. (CAP repeats those misleading tactics by referencing the impact of prior coverage expansions in the United States, many of which used private insurers and none of which directly equate to a universal, government-funded health system.)

Of the papers four peer nations with universal coverage systemsAustralia, France, Germany, and Swedenonly Australia and Sweden have government-run insurance plans. By contrast, France and Germany rely on private insurers to implement their universal coverage systems.

While it includes other systems without single-payer coverage in its analysis, CAP specifically excludes Britains National Health Service, known for its waiting times and rationed access to care. CAP claimed to omit the NHS in its analysis because no candidate currently running for president is proposing nationalizing health care providers a la the British modela true enough statement, but a self-serving one.

If CAP included non-government-funded systems in its analysis, it certainly should have included the government-funded NHS. That it did not suggests the analysts wanted to rig the papers outcomes by relying solely on favorable examples.

The CAP papers most deliberate omission comes in the form of our neighbor to the north: Canada. The paper examined four metrics of access to care, based on data from an analysis by the (liberal) Commonwealth Fund of 11 countries health systems. Given the shabby results Canadas health system showed on health care access, it seems little wonder that the leftists at CAP failed to disclose these poor outcomes in their paper:

As I discuss in my book, Canadas health system suffers from myriad access problems, based on other metrics from Commonwealth Fund studies that CAP chose not to mention in their paper:

With results like that, little wonder that the liberals at CAP didnt want to highlight what single-payer health care would do to our health system.

That said, some socialist supporters of single payer have conceded that the new system will limit access to care. As I noted last year, the socialist magazine Jacobin said the following about one analysis of single payer:

[The study] assumes utilization of health services will increase by 11 percent, but aggregate health service utilization is ultimately dependent on the capacity to provide services, meaning utilization could hit a hard limit below the level [the study] projects.

Translation: People will demand additional care under single payer, but there wont be enough doctors and hospitals to meet the demand, therefore resulting in waiting times and rationed access to care.

Lest one consider this admission an anomaly, the Peoples Policy Project called a recent Urban Institute study estimating the costs of single payer ridiculous and unserious, in large part because of its comical assumption about increased demand for care: There is still a hard limit to just how much health care can be performed because there are only so many doctors and only so many facilities. Again, socialists claim that single payer wont bust the budget, in large part because people who seek care will not be able to obtain it.

With analysts from the right and the socialist left both admitting that single payer will lead to rationed health care, CAP can continue to claim that waiting times wont increase. But the best response to their cherry-picked and misleading analysis comes in the form of an old phrase: Who are you going to believeme, or your lying eyes?

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Yes, Socialized Medicine Will Lead To Waits For Care - The Federalist