Politics & Power Quote by Mark Steyn

Steyn’s line is built less like a policy claim than a warning siren: a vivid, repetitive rhythm meant to make “government health care” feel like a lived bodily experience of delay. The triple beat of “waiting, waiting, waiting” is doing the real work here. It turns an administrative problem into a kind of captivity, a narrative where time itself is confiscated by the state. That cadence is memorable, quotable, and emotionally sticky, which is exactly the point.

The intent is plainly argumentative, but the subtext is cultural. Steyn isn’t only criticizing rationing or queue management; he’s framing public health systems as a lesson in political psychology: when government runs care, the citizen becomes a supplicant. The jab at “people who have never lived under it and don’t know” draws an us-versus-them line. It casts proponents of single-payer as naive tourists and elevates the speaker as the hard-eyed guide who’s seen the ruins. It also smuggles in a particular idea of “freedom”: not just rights on paper, but the ability to convert money and urgency into immediate action.

“Routine in America” is the comparative dagger. It flatters the American system as efficient and modern while implying that other countries’ models are inevitably stagnant. That move is rhetorically neat and empirically vulnerable: it generalizes from the most politically potent failures (surgery waitlists) while skipping the American system’s own queues (network denials, prior authorization, unaffordable care). In the broader context of U.S. health-care debates, this is a classic anti-single-payer frame: translate complexity into a single nightmare image - the endless waiting room - and let fear do the persuading.