When Everything Is Free, Nothing Is
28th December 2025
A tragic story came about out of Canada. A 44 year old man died after waiting more than eight hours in an emergency room with chest pain, blurry vision, and a blood pressure of 210.
This story establishes the human cost of delayed care. No one involved acted maliciously. Not the doctors. Not the nurses. Not the triage staff. They were inundated, operating exactly as the system is designed to function under extreme load. This is also unfortunately not a unique experience, as over half a million Canadians leave the ER every year without being seen.
That leads us to some uncomfortable truths.
Healthcare is a scarce resource. If an emergency physician is seeing one patient, they cannot simultaneously see another. The same constraint applies to clinic appointments, operating rooms, imaging slots, lab capacity, ICU beds, and nursing attention. Scarcity is unavoidable.
And if a resource is scarce, it must be allocated.
A minor cough and a major heart attack are competing for the same finite pool of time, staff, and space. The only real question is how that allocation occurs.
In a modern society, there are only two ways to allocate scarce resources: price signals or central planning.
Canada has government-provided health-care that is even more broken than the UK system.
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