From a reader:

Hi Jonah, Another anecdote for you, although a Canuck one. As you know, we have socialized medicine. Or rather, we have a socialized health care system which results in very little medicine actually being done. Anyway, everyone is always complaining that we have a “two tier” system because the rich can get health care just by going to the States. But that’s crap. The real two tier system is that if you know someone on the inside, you can get your tests done a lot more quickly. My husband’s a physician. Last Thanksgiving (on the holiday), when we feared his mother may have cancer, he got her into the Emergency, had a CAT Scan and an MRI, an appointment with a surgeon, all booked within 24 hours. Usually that would take roughly six months, if the patient lived that long. It turned out she was fine, but my mother-in-law is blue collar, hardly rich. But she has connections. A rich person in our town without those connections would be in the line with the rest of them. Friendship matters.

Me: This is kind of funny because my father-in-law was just telling me a couple weeks ago how the system pretty much worked the exact same way in Czechoslovakia before the fall of Communism. He’s from over there, if you didn’t know.