I caught this NPR piece this morning contrasting the realities of the Canadian health care system with the scare tactics, common in right-wing adverts in the states, about people waiting months behind walls of bureaucracy in order to get urgent cancer treatments.

Not surprisingly, these scary examples offered by opponents of health care reform are, at best, extreme exaggerations, and at worst, outright lies. According to the story, Canadians are generally very happy with the quality of their care. and When there have been occasions when people have had to wait for a long time for various services, the government has taken steps to correct the issues quickly and transparently.

The Canadian system is not really, as people categorize it, “socialized medicine” (though I still don’t quite know why “socialism” is a dirty word, but that’s another topic), but rather a basic national health insurance program, paid for via income and sales taxes. Everybody’s covered by the government insurance system; spreading the risk across a large population, therefore reducing costs for everyone.. Canadians can go to whatever doctor they care to; that doctor (who operates as a private business, not a government employee) just bills the government, rather than a private insurance provider like they’d do in the US.

And, of course, a public insurance operation isn’t be set up to maximize profits (denying claims to keep collected premiums in their coffers), so it’s not in the health care denial business, but rather the provider business.

My simple question about all this is why the hell aren’t we aiming straight for this kind of model in the current US health care debate, instead of hemming and hawing about it? While it’s not perfect, it’s certainly a better model than our current “pay money to private insurers so they can refuse to pay unless we jump though thousands of capitalist bureaucratic hoops” model? Statistics like Life Expectancy (according to the UN, US #38, Canada #11) and Infant Mortality (again UN: US #33, Canada #23) prove that Canada (and the other modern industrialized nations ranking ahead of both of us) is getting the job done, in terms of maintaining a healthy population, much more effectively than we are.

Why don’t we let go of misplaced national pride and do like every other capitalist free market business would do: find what works and copy it?