[sidek]

Your argument is not supported by data. The NHS and Canada's universal healthcare systems have been around for decades.

Yet there is no evidence to suggest the factors you describe have ever been part of the public discussion in those countries. And the US is the country with the most draconian drug laws in the Anglosphere.

[crisdux]

It sure is supported. The NHS will delay or deny surgery to people if they are tobacco users or above a specific BMI. This was a pretty big debate in the UK a couple years ago. Crazy thing is this was motivated by cost cutting, not concerns about the success of the surgery.

[refurb]

Canada led the way in making smoking much less attractive, more so than the US. High taxes, large warnings - the govt had a strong incentive when it’s footing the bill.

[TheRealSteel]

Nope - Canada has a higher smoking rate than the US:

https://uwaterloo.ca/tobacco-use-canada/adult-tobacco-use/sm...

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adul...

[refurb]

That doesn’t contradict my point that the Canadian govt did more than the US govt to stop smoking.

[notatoad]

There's a big difference between taxing it and marketing campaigns to warn of the dangers, and "policing" it like the parent said.

The government is not forbidding anybody from smoking.

[mthoms]

Not really conclusive for several reasons.

The Canada numbers include teenagers (persons aged 12+) while the US ones do not (persons aged 18+).

Also, the Canada numbers went from 13% (lower than the reported US rate) in 2015 to 15.1% (higher than the US rate) in 2017. That 13 to 15.1% increase over two years seems to be a statistical anomaly as it goes sharply against the overall trend (according to your source):

"Despite the overall prevalence increase in the most recent survey year, from 1999 to 2017, the overall trend was an average annual decrease in prevalence of 3.2% of the previous year’s value"

TLDR; the average over the last several years is more or less the same.

[apta]

Canada is like 1/10th the size of the US's population. These things don't necessarily scale linearly.

[TheRealSteel]

Care to explain why not? This seems like a very hand-wavy excuse with no mathematics behind it.

[corporate_shi11]

Nations are highly complex systems. All the different 'parts' interact with one another to some extent. Thus when you double a nation's size, the number of interacting 'parts' will exponentially increase. All of these interactions can pose potential problems, or opportunities, but what's clear is that you can't linearly extrapolate one nation's experiences across nations of different sizes.

[mthoms]

>Thus when you double a nation's size, the number of interacting 'parts' will exponentially increase.

This doesn't sound right at all. Why would the number of interacting parts increase exponentially? And why would that result in decreased economic efficiency rather than increased?

Doesn't this very idea run counter to one of the basic tenets of capitalism that "bigger is better" (due to economies of scale)?

>what's clear is that you can't linearly extrapolate one nation's experiences across nations of different sizes

Maybe true, but IMHO not at all for reasons of economic size. That is, all other things being equal, increasing the size of an economic system should make it more efficient, not less.