This NY Sunday Times article explores Britain’s state-financed dental system and finds that the lines for treatment are so long that some citizens simply opt to treating themselves:
Britain has too few public dentists for too many people. At the beginning of the year, just 49 percent of the adults and 63 percent of the children in England and Wales were registered with public dentists.
And now, discouraged by what they say is the assembly-line nature of the job and by a new contract that pays them to perform a set number of “units of dental activity” per year, even more dentists are abandoning the health service and going into private practice ó some 2,000 in April alone, the British Dental Association says.
How does this affect the teeth of the nation? [ . . .]
“I snapped it out myself,” said William Kelly, 43, describing his most recent dental procedure, the autoextraction of one of his upper teeth.
Now it is a jagged black stump, and the pain gnawing at Mr. Kelly’s mouth has transferred itself to a different tooth, mottled and rickety, on the other side of his mouth. “I’m in the middle of pulling that one out, too,” he said. [ . . .]
A recent Guardian newspaper article about the company titled “D.I.Y. Dentistry” (meaning Do It Yourself) said that the previous week British drugstores had sold 6,000 jars of the filling replacement, and 6,000 of the crown-and-cap replacement.
Keep this article handy to show to the next person who advocates a state-funded health care finance system for the U.S.
The NYTimes article shows nothing other than that an underfunded publicly-funded health-care system won’t provide adequate services. Britain spendsmuch less per capita on health care than the US. If they chose to up that by a little bit, I doubt they’d have trouble finding dentists.
This is all to say that existence of a waiting list in Canada or an insufficient supply of dentists in Britain is not probative of whether or not state-funded health care is more desirable than the US’s hodge podge. It’s just probative of whether or not those countries are spending at the right levels (however they chose to define “right”). My understanding is that, if you compare the healthfulness of Americans to that of Canadians or Brits, and take into account expenditures, they do much better. Those studies are complex and open to criticism, but its much more relevant than the point you’re extrapolating from this article.