No, that's illegal. Thats what single payer means, only one payer is allowed [1].

Is meant to encourage rich people to support the health system since everyone's in it. But in reality the very wealthy go to Buffalo and immigrants visit their home countries.

It's also not lost on public policy experts that MAID has the potential of "solving" a lot of structural problems in Canadian health care and... long and behold MAID has expanded tremendously in ten years.

[1] with some exceptions largely grandfathered in

That's not what single payer actually means, since Australia has both a single payer public system and a separate private system. The part that allows these to both exist is that the public system has vast resources (i.e. an entire national/set of state governments) that can act as one for immense negotiating power. This does not preclude a private system from existing.

> But in reality the very wealthy go to Buffalo

This has to be a brand new sentence (post 1950s anyway).

It's not meant to "encourage the rich to support" the health system, it's meant to avoid completely gutting the public health system by creating a parallel pay-for-play system where only the richest pay and subsequently suck up all of the already finite resources and talent.

Introducing parallel private health care is just accelerationism for privatization wonks who want to just see the death of universal healthcare by sucking it dry for those willing to pay.

There's no magic wand with the resources available for healthcare. Creating private systems so rich people can skip the line doesnt magically create that capability, it means taking that capability from someone who maybe needed it more in the public side of things.