"Free healthcare is cool," comedian Shane Gillis recently said on The Joe Rogan Experience. "We should have that."

"You should treat the entire country like it's a community," Rogan replied. "If you had a community, would you want the sickest person to fucking die who could be very valuable if you could take care of them, and do you have the resources to take care of them?"

While support for "free" healthcare in the United States is not new—Harry Truman campaigned on universal health insurance in 1948, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has popularized the "Medicare For All" slogan in recent years—the policy has received renewed interest of late. The Democratic Socialists of America have made universal healthcare "at no cost to individuals" a key component of their party's expensive platform.

But it is not just political hopefuls who like the idea of universal healthcare; academics seem to as well. A recent study by the Yale School of Public Health claims that single-payer universal healthcare would save more than 100,000 lives a year, and would supposedly cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet, appears to come to its conclusions by modeling a scenario that assumes cheaper pharmaceutical prices, less administrative overhead, reduced fraud, and fewer emergency visits.

But we do not need modeling of unrealistic scenarios to see what universal healthcare could do for Americans; we just need to look at countries that have already implemented this system.

In Canada, the closest country to the United States that has universal healthcare, healthcare spending is responsible for 12.7 percent of GDP, several percentage points higher than the average spend of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Despite this higher spending, the median waiting time between referral from a general practitioner and receiving treatment has hit 28.6 weeks, which is 208 percent longer than the wait Canadian patients would have expected in 1993. From April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024, almost 15,500 people died waiting for healthcare in Canada, according to data compiled by SecondStreet via a Freedom to Information Act request. In 2025, 9.1 percent of Canadians "expressed unmet needs for healthcare," compared to the OECD average of 3.4 percent.

In 2020, 62 percent of Canadians who needed specialist care waited at least a month to get it, compared with just 31 percent of patients in the United States. Drawing on results from the Commonwealth Fund's International Health Survey, the OECD found that in 2023, more than one in 10 Canadians who needed a specialist appointment reported waiting over a year. Among the 10 countries surveyed, the only other country where this proportion of patients reported waiting over a year was the United Kingdom.

When the U.K. established the National Health Service (NHS) after World War II, NHS architect Clement Attlee envisioned a welfare state that provided care for British citizens from "cradle to grave." Today, like Canada, long waiting lists are a common fixture. Latest figures from the NHS show that 7.3 million people—or around 1 in 10 people in the U.K.—are on NHS waiting lists. Over 105,000 cases involved patients who had been waiting over a year for treatment.

On Tuesday, The Telegraph reported that patients have died after doctors were encouraged to refer fewer people to hospital under the NHS Advice and Guidance (A&G) system introduced earlier this year. The A&G attempts to reduce hospital waiting lists by encouraging doctors to consult a hospital specialist before formally referring a patient. The Health Services Safety Investigations Body recently said that "poorly designed or inadequately monitored pathways have contributed to physical harm, delayed and missed diagnoses, and in some cases to delays in cancer care." For instance, The Telegraph reported on one patient who was suffering from regular seizures when their doctor made an A&G request. After waiting for weeks, the patient had a seizure and died of cardiac arrest at home.

The NHS performs poorly on almost every available measure compared to other systems. In the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.K. reported an avoidable mortality rate of 71 per 100,000 people—the second-highest avoidable deaths in all of Western Europe (though it did perform better than the United States). For the most common types of cancer, U.K. survival rates rank near the bottom of Europe, often only marginally ahead of the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Among comparable high-income countries, the U.K. has some of the lowest five-year survival rates for breast, cervical, colorectal, and lung cancers. "Cancer exemplifies the problems with the UK's health system," according to the King's Fund. "Early detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer is critical for improving patient outcomes, yet the UK compares poorly on all."

The lack of quality care in Britain has had serious ramifications for patients like Carly, a 31-year-old mother of two. She tells Reason that while pregnant with her second child, doctors discovered a "basketball-sized tumor" that needed to be removed through emergency surgery. Yet "for the next four weeks," she says, "every week it would come up to like the day before, maybe two days before my surgery had been scheduled for, and they would cancel it." 

After eventually undergoing a successful surgery at 23 weeks pregnant, Carly says her morphine pump repeatedly ran out, despite doctors warning her that unmanaged pain could trigger labor. She was also told that she, not hospital staff, was in charge of staying on top of her medications. "I didn't shower. I was there for five days, and I didn't shower. Nobody changed my bedding," she says. Looking back, Carly says, "I feel like I was let down horrendously," adding that she "would have happily gone into medical debt in the U.S. to avoid what happened to me in that situation."

Failures like these are not surprising in universal healthcare systems. "Every time someone advocates a government activity…they say this is going to save lives. Almost never do they provide evidence establishing that," Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute's director of health policy studies, tells Reason. "No one ever tallies all of the costs of extracting that money out of the economy…[or] the foregone benefits of whatever the people who earn that money would have spent it on."

The U.S. healthcare system has plenty of problems. While the promise of "free stuff" may sound tempting, the experience of countries with universal healthcare should make Americans deeply skeptical of the idea that putting the government in charge of the entire system is a panacea.

The post Universal Healthcare Sounds Great. Here's What's Happening in Countries That Have It. appeared first on Reason.com.

Oh. It's because literally every car in the garage is doing wifi bukkake, several floors below me, through many feet of concrete.

We've written dozens of posts about dogs who go to great extents to find ways out of their enclosures (such as this nimble French bulldog). But here's a law-abiding Frenchie who makes sure to stay within his boundaries — even when said boundary is just a few strips of masking tape. — Read the rest

Enlarge / A box of Sudafed PE sinus pressure and pain medicine containing phenylephrine is displayed for sale in a CVS Pharmacy store in Hawthorne, California, on September 12, 2023. (credit: Getty | PATRICK T. FALLON)

Drug store giant CVS revealed late last week that it is voluntarily pulling some common cold and flu medicines from its shelves because they don't work—while many other ineffective products remain on the shelves.

The move by CVS comes after an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration last month voted unanimously that the common decongestant, phenylephrine, is ineffective at treating a stuffy nose. But it comes ahead of the FDA itself acting on the vote, which will likely lead the agency to revoke phenylephrine's approval, eventually.

In a statement to Ars, a CVS spokesperson suggested the FDA advisory panel's vote was the impetus for the change, but that it would "follow direction from the FDA."

"We are removing a small number of oral decongestant products that contain phenylephrine as the only active ingredient from CVS Pharmacy stores but will continue offering many other oral cough and cold products to meet consumer needs," CVS's statement read. It didn't provide additional details on which or how many products would be removed, or when the removals would be complete.

The culling of phenylephrine products from drug-store shelves is a long-sought win for both researchers and consumers. Since at least 2007, researchers have expressed doubt about the effectiveness of phenylephrine, which is in popular oral medicines with brand names including Sudafed, Mucinex, Nyquil, and Benadryl. The small studies from the 1960s and 1970s that formed the basis of the FDA's initial approval in 1976 were found to be seriously flawed. And three large clinical trials since 2007 showed the drug doesn't work. Pharmacological studies showed why: Phenylephrine is highly metabolized in the gut, with less than 1 percent of active drug remaining bioavailable. Consumers, meanwhile, were largely in the dark, spending nearly $2 billion in 2022 on these products that researchers have said for years don't work.

But as these useless drugs finally vanish from CVS shelves, left behind is an entire class of products that are equally useless: homeopathic products.

“Snake oil” remains

These bogus treatments are based on centuries-old pseudoscience and have repeatedly been proven to be no more effective than placebo. In fact, if they were to prove effective, it would upend fundamental scientific understandings. For decades, consumer advocates and watchdogs have railed against them, yet these products are readily available on the shelves of every major drug store.

Homeopathy relies on two false ideas: the "law of similars" aka "like cures like," meaning a substance that causes a specific symptom in a healthy person can treat conditions and diseases in an ill person with that same symptom; and the "law of infinitesimals," which states that diluting a supposedly curative substance renders it more potent at treating medical conditions. As such, homeopathic products often start with bizarre, sometimes toxic substances that end up being diluted into oblivion in ritualistic procedures. The result is simply water or inactive filler ingredients. Homeopaths have acknowledged this and sometimes counter that water molecules have a "memory" of substances (they don't).

A homeopathic product lurking on a CVS shelf alongside real medicines. (credit: CFI)

Sound absurd? It is. And yet, homeopathic products are not only available in major drug stores and retailers around the country, they're often sold on the same shelves, side by side with evidence-based medicines that have gone through rigorous FDA safety and efficacy evaluations.

The FDA does have the authority to regulate homeopathic products. But, based on the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, homeopathic products are generally considered exempt from pre-market FDA safety and efficacy reviews as long as the active ingredient is included in the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia, a published list of substances approved by homeopaths. As such, homeopathic products enter the market without any FDA review—and sit on shelves with FDA-approved, evidence-based medicines.

"Most people don't know what this stuff is," Nicholas Little, vice president and legal director for the consumer advocacy organization the Center for Inquiry (CFI), said of homeopathic products in an interview with Ars.

Double standards

Little and CFI are currently engaged in a lengthy legal battle with CVS and Walmart, in which they're suing the retailers to try to get them to at least physically separate homeopathic products from effective, FDA-approved medications and provide clear information to consumers about what homeopathy actually is—which in CFI's words is "snake oil."

To see CVS remove phenylephrine-containing medicines over ineffectiveness, but not homeopathic products, immediately drew some questions from the advocacy organization.

"I want to ask CVS why they draw the distinction between these over-the-counter cold medicines that the FDA says don't work and these other over-the-counter homeopathic... products that the FDA also says don't work. Why do you draw that difference? Is it a business decision? They're the only ones that can answer that," Little said.

CVS declined to answer when Ars asked why the companies aren't removing homeopathic products in addition to some phenylephrine-containing products over ineffectiveness.

But Little makes clear that CFI isn't necessarily trying to get homeopathic products stripped from shelves. They will be happy if retailers simply provide consumers with information on homeopathic products so they aren't duped into buying them, thinking they're similar to effective, FDA-approved medications.

"I know so many people… hell, I've done this myself, I've bought [a homeopathic] product by mistake," Little said. In a trip to the drug store while sick or as a weary parent of a miserably ill child, it's easy to mistakenly pick up a homeopathic product in haste or the fog of infection. They're not only right next to evidence-based drugs, they often have comforting images and appealing, yet meaningless, labels like "natural." They sometimes tout having no side effects.

"Of course there are no side effects, there's nothing in it," Little noted.

Diluted protections

And even consumers who try to do their due diligence and read the labels may still be in the dark about what's in the products. The starting ingredients are usually written in Latin, and their dilutions are described in obtuse homeopathic nomenclature, such as "200C."

One of Little's favorite examples is Oscillococcinum, a homeopathic product sold as a cold and flu treatment by Boiron, one of the largest manufacturers of homeopathic products worldwide. (You can buy it at CVS, Target, Walgreens, etc.) The "active ingredient" in Oscillococcinum is anas barbariae—which, in case you didn't know, is an extract made from the heart and liver of a Muscovy duck. There's insufficient evidence to suggest duck organ extract is effective against cold and flu. And, as Little and CFI noted in a letter to the FDA last month, the anas barbariae in Oscillococcinum is nonexistent. It is:

prepared to a homeopathic dilution of 200C, meaning, in plain English, that there is one part duck offal to 10⁴⁰⁰ parts of water in the “treatment.” Given that research estimates there to be between 10⁷⁸ and 10⁸² [atoms] in the entirety of the observable universe, it is a physical impossibility for there to be a single atom of duck offal left in the product. Oscillococcinum is nothing more than a sugar pill.

Little and CFI's letter concluded by urging the FDA to remove Oscillococcinum and other bunkum homeopathic products from the market. In the interview with Ars, Little said the organization is pursuing the lawsuits against CVS and Walmart in hopes it can move the process along faster than the sluggish pace of bureaucracy at the FDA, which also struggles with limited resources. Still, the lawsuits are also expected to be a lengthy process. They're currently in the discovery process, and Little said he's anxious to directly question the pharmacy giant's decision to remove phenylephrine and not homeopathic drugs.

For now, Little is pleased to see some movement from the FDA and CVS on phenylephrine. "Congratulations to CVS for being responsible and looking after customers on this—that's great, big props to them," he said. "Now just tell them to do the same on homeopathy."

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