This is another unfortunate misconception. In comparative studies between the United States and Canada, Canada's Health Care system was deemed to be superior to that of the US's. The comparison was not resoundingly favourable to Canada, but nevertheless, the average citizen receives a higher quality of care here, vs., there.
Well, that's a play on words. Better "quality" of care is not quite accurate. There is a definite benefit associated with everyone being covered in Canada, and that preventative measure surely saves Canada some money, and its better for the people in the lower economic classes but better "quality" isn't accurate. The best "quality" medical care is available in the US.
And, as an aside, if you consider the racial homogeneity of Canada the average lifespan isn't that impressive. Your average live span is about that of the average white male in the US. The effect of the average black males lifespan alone throws off our average life span quite a bit (while I'm sure some of this difference in life expectancy between blacks and whites is socieconomic, I've personally seen pretty compelling evidence to suggest that there is a very strong genetic factor). In reality, whites in the US have similar, if not better, life expectancy to whites in Canada (the values change depending on the source). What I believe is a very unfortunate misconception is that the US has a lower level of medical care than places like Cuba, et cetera (thank you Michael Mooron). Cubans living long lives doesn't mean that you want to get a heart transplant done in Cuba. Latin people tend to have longer life expectancies in General, so the life expectancy of Cubans being greater than that of Americans is no surprise because its based on a mean. The truth is that Latinos in America enjoy longer life expectancies than they do in their countries of origin, Cuba included (77 men, 83 women, 80 average).
The biggest problems the US has right now, and a massive contributor to the enormous costs, are: 1) out of control litigation and 2) out of control illegal immigration.
The recent Vice Presidential candidate / bastard John Edwards personally contributed to the number of cesarian sections and the costs associate with both operating a hospital and being an OB/GYN (huge malpractice insurance) based on a statistically unjustified association he drew between doctors not performing cesarians and cerebral palsy. This is just one example, but billions of dollars flowed out of doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies because of him alone. Again, he's just one of many bastards of his type taking advantage of our legal system.
Then there is the illegal immigrant problem. We've got 10-20 million illegal immigrants in the US, most of which have no insurance and produce ungodly numbers of sickly children. In california alone we've seen around 25 hospitals close down in recent years due to costs incurred by illegal immigration.
Anyway, the US healthcare system is in need of major reform. And, although we can learn from the positive associated with the Canadian healthcare system I think to turn to a socialist healthcare policy would be a turn for the worse, especially when considering our exploding illegal population who absolutely love free services without providing sufficient economic input to offset their usage.
