,,,And we take it for granted

Good read here.

Both sides of the Canada-U.S. border look at each other's health care systems and diagnose collective insanity. What we tend to forget is that health care is either a product of, or tends to shape, society as a whole. 

Misconceptions abound on either side. In the U.S., federal law mandates access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay, so theoretically at least, you don't die on account of being poor. In Canada, life-threatening cases take medical priority, so theoretically at least, you don't die on account of all those people with sniffles ahead of you in line. (In my experience at least, most of the sit-around-and-wait in hospital emergency rooms is precisely because of a constant stream of real emergencies flowing in. In Canada, being poor isn't the problem: having access to a family doctor is. I went without one myself for over a decade, and am lucky now to have one younger than I am.)

But half of all American bankrupts in 2001 cited "medical reasons" for their bankruptcy, which disgusts my Canadian sensibilities. America is the only wealthy industrialized nation without universal health care. I know Americans like to consider themselves exceptional, but that's not always a good thing. And then there's the matter of expenditure: spending in the U.S., per capita, is a full 23% higher than in Canada.

Wikipedia's got a nice summary of the two systems here. It's fair to say both have their strengths and weaknesses. The tipping point for me isn't so much the form our universal health care system takes, but that we have it at all. It really has shaped us as a nation. It's almost a subliminal thing: we shudder in revulsion at what we perceive to be the underlying philosophy of the American system: you pay, you play. Not to be smug, but we think we're a trifle more caring than that.

Obama means to introduce some variant of a single-payer system to America, which has his opponents on the right in a state of apoplexy. (They really should see a doctor: it's a good thing they can afford to.) Should he succeed, as the linked article above asserts, there will be a sea change in American values in short order. For the better, I'd say. That's but one more reason to vote for Sen. Obama...