Here's some perspective from a Canadian. I wasn't going to bother but seeing the left/right red/blue us/them nastiness explode like that made me figure maybe I should make it all worthwhile. No point in responding to all the bow-down-before-the-beloved-corporations horseshit. I do take issue with that quoted article though. Ben (the author), I'm glad you left. You belong down there. I would rather flee to the woods and live on squirrel meat than move down to http://www.jesusland.com/. I'd trade 10 of you for any one of these http://www.marryanamerican.ca/. If you ever come back to visit you might want to check this stuff out http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/americas/12/07/canada.tshirts.ap/index.htm.... First of all, what's with taking a simple word like liberal or socialist and trying to turn it into a dirty insult?? All that "well he's a liberal" and "well that's just socialist" with some kind of you-know-what-i-mean wink-wink tone to it is totally lost on me. Yes there are waiting lists. Is waiting for surgery somehow inferior to being told "fuck off you penniless fucking bum"? I don't think so. Yes our income taxes are higher, but that's because we live in the now - no defecit - and don't ask our great grandchildren to take care of the bills. There is no 15.5% sales tax. There is a 7% national sales tax (GST), and then provinces have the right to collect their own sales tax (PST). Here in British Columbia the PST was just reduced from 7.5 to 7%. Next door in Alberta there is no PST. Look up the rest if you're curious. Gasonline is taxed at a higher rate, but we have 3.2 people/km2 while the USA has 29 people/km2 - we need way more roads, and we have 1/10th the people to pay for them! Americans are subsidizing Canadian drugs? ROFL! That's not even worth getting into. Blah blah, immigrants, blah blah 16%GST?!?! - I heard it here first!, blah blah regional/fringe political parties - 70% my ass, blah blah be *very* afraid of socialism. Socialism doesn't work? By what measure? Last I heard the vast majority of the best places to live were socialist countries. Anyway, what I think is that we have a great philosophy for our system, it's just in the details where we could use a little work. Privatization is not the answer, even though it seems to be in vogue right now. They are taking jobs like kitchen and cleaning work that used to support families and eliminating them and replacing them with minimum wage high turnover jobs that can't be doing anything good to the level of quality. I heard that they are taking the laundry from some local hospitals and shipping it 1000 miles out onto the prairies to be cleaned. Can you think of any way that might make sense? I don't think there's any way that a corporation can offer a service at a cheaper cost (while also skimming profits off the top) without directly and indirectly lowering the quality of life for everyone. And never mind the manual labour, they are starting to do the same thing with private clinics and contracting out things like diagnostics and laser eye surgery. Give it 10 more years and we might not have anything to argue about anymore, unless me and people like me do something about it. The whole thing started in the 90s when drastic cuts were made as part of eliminating the federal defecit. Now all of a sudden our healthcare system is "fundamentally broken" and instead of just funding it properly we're trying out all kinds of mad experiments on it. I hope we see the light before it's too late. Then there's drugs. I don't think people should be forced top pay extra money for life saving medicine so that big pharma can afford to come up with things like prozac and viagra. I say open the floodgates and let the generic drugs flow. That would be the biggest single thing that could get our healthcare system back in shape. Then there's doctors. No, actually, the government does not tell them where to work. Healthcare is a run by the provinces, with just some funding help from the federal government. Here in British Columbia I think they give bonuses to the doctors who are willing to work in rural areas, but that's about as far as the coersion goes. But seriously there are some problems with doctors raking in too much money. Yes they deserve decent pay for all the education they have, but if they want really big bucks they should have gone into professional sports. Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons need to swing the pendulum back towards weeding out the bad seeds and away from automatically protecting their own. I'm lucky I'm mostly healthy and so don't have a lot of direct experience, but I've taken my girlfriend through the system for surgery a couple times in the last few years. It wasn't like staying in a 5 star hotel, and like anywhere there were some people in serious need of some attitude adjustment (and some angels), but she got everything she needed. The company I work for only just got started offering extended medical this fall. I shudder to think what might have hapened if we were living in the USA at the time. Anyway, not sure if any of that is what you were looking for, but I needed to vent ;-) mike. ps If you want to know how a good health care system is run, check out Cuba. Seriously. By all indicators the best in the world. Stick that in your pipes and smoke it all you Bush boosters.