airth10,
Open your eyes. The only reason Canada’s health system works, even as badly as it does, is because thousands of Canadians can come to the USA every year and get diagnosis or treatment they need without waiting for six months to a few years for it, as they do in Canada. You come across horror stories about that constantly, if you pay attention. Canada is now flirting with a ten month waiting period for maternity beds. A year or two ago a woman with quadruplets had to be flown to Great Falls, Montana to have her babies because that was the nearest place she could find a neonatal intensive care unit for them. It wasn’t just that there was none available in Alberta, there was none available anywhere in the whole of Canada. As Mark Steyn sarcastically put it, you can hardly expect an industrialized, G-8 nation of thirty million to have the sort of medical facilities of a city of 50,000 in the backwoods of Montana.

European health systems achieve their “lower costs” by skimping on care, hiring foreign staff from Third World countries who will work for much less than a native, and rationing care, sort of like triage. In Britain recently the PM ordered that emergency rooms must see all patients within four hours of being admitted. In order to achieve this the staff left patients in ambulances for hours before admitting them to ER, when they still had to wait four hours. The ambulences, of course, were unavailable for further emergency calls while this was going on. Yeah, those nationalized health services are sooooo wonderful. Feh.