U.S. Democratic socialist Senate candidate from Michigan Abdul El-Sayed, who has lied about being a doctor (he went to medical school, yes, but never got licensed as a physician and has never treated a single patient) went on Fox News on Monday and was asked the obvious question about single-payer healthcare systems: the waiting. His answer was to flip it around. Do you know what the average wait for a cardiologist is in America? Two and a half months, he said. Nobody should wait that long. Two and a half weeks, maybe. Two and a half hours would be better.
Nice rhetoric. But the problem is, he’s dead wrong, and his lack of actually having taken care of patients shows. The figure routinely cited for new-patient, non-emergency cardiology appointments in the United States is about 32 days, and that’s drawn from surveys weighted toward major metropolitan markets, where the waits run longest. In the United Kingdom — the system he insists he isn’t proposing — the comparable wait runs around three months. He took the American number, roughly doubled it, and used it as making his the case for the federal government to take over one-sixth of the economy.
This is all BS.
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Ask anyone who has actually needed a cardiologist. People get in within a week all the time. If a physician flags something urgent, you are seen in days, because American cardiology has capacity that systems built on rationing simply do not. Which brings us to the part El-Sayed and his socialist chums never address.
There are a finite number of cardiologists in this country. They can only work a finite number of hours. The wait time for an appointment is a function of how many patients are chasing those hours. Medicare for All does not create a single new physician. It does not open a residency slot, build a cath lab, or add an hour to anyone’s day. What it does is eliminate cost as a constraint on demand, which means more people seeking more appointments against the same fixed supply.
That’s not ideology. It’s arithmetic, and every country that has tried it has gotten the same result: insane wait times, often to the point of causing patients harm. The long waits are designed to be a rationing mechanism. When you refuse to let price dictate a scarce service or commodity, wait times then dictact, and in cardiology the people at the back of that line are often people with a the worst heart conditions.
Of course, El-Sayed’s response was that we’re the richest, most powerful country in the world and as such, we shouldn’t assume we’d do it as badly as everyone else. Set aside the flattery — it’s an admission dressed as a boast. He’s conceding that these systems do deliver long waits, and asking voters to believe American exceptionalism will suspend the rules of supply and demand. Nobody has explained how, because nobody can, and neither can he.
And the scale point is the one his side keeps ignoring. Britain runs its queues for roughly 69 million people. Canada for about 40 million. The United States has 340 million. Whatever strain those systems show, ours would show it at several times worse.
This is a candidate who already flip-flopped on Medicare for All once this cycle. Now he’s inventing statistics to hide the fact that it’s what he really wants. And it’s a bad option for all Americans, not just those in Michigan.
