Liberals like me frequently bemoan the inequality of the U.S. health care system -- it is the best in the world if you have the money or insurance to pay for it. But for a growing number of Americans who have no health insurance at all (around 50 million at last count) or who have inadequate health insurance coverage, receiving quality care is a distant dream. Many of us point to Canada as a model of how a publicly-funded healthcare system can work.

But as this CBS News article points out, Canada’s health care system apparently isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. In fact, in many ways, it is experiencing a major crisis that includes skyrocketing costs, long waits for certain procedures, and lack of doctors and nurses. As the article describes,

The average Canadian family pays about 48 percent of its income in taxes each year, partly to fund the health care system. Rates vary from province to province, but Ontario, the most populous, spends roughly 40 percent of every tax dollar on health care, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. The system is going broke, says the federation. It calculates that at present rates, Ontario will be spending 85 percent of its budget on health care by 2035. . .

Canadians can buy insurance for dental and eye care, physical and chiropractic therapy, long-term nursing and prescriptions, among other services. But according to experts on both sides of the debate, Canada and North Korea are the only countries with laws banning the purchase of insurance for hospitalization or surgery. Meanwhile, the average wait for surgical or specialist treatment is nearly 18 weeks, up from 9.3 weeks in 1993. . . The average wait for an orthopedic surgeon was more than nine months.

An estimated 4 million of Canada’s 33 million people don’t have family physicians and more than 1 million are on waiting lists for treatment, according to the Canadian Medical Association. Meanwhile, some 200 physicians head to the United States each year, attracted by lower taxes and better working conditions. Canada has 2.1 physicians per 1,000 people, while Belgium has 3.9, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The World Health Organization in 2000 ranked France’s health system as the best, followed by Italy, Spain, Oman and Australia. Canada came in 30th and the United States 37th.

Pretty eye-opening. I had always thought that Canada’s system was far superior to that of the U.S. But apparently, they are also suffering from the ever-increasing costs of providing medical care. However, it does sound a little strange that Canada actually forbids private its citizens from having private health insurance.

It seems to me that once again, there needs to be a balance. On the one hand, a virtually all-private system like the U.S.’s produces extraordinary inequality between those with money and those without. On the other hand, a virtually all-public system like Canada’s seems to produce long waits and shortages of services.

Perhaps France’s hybrid system is the best of both worlds -- apparently it must be for the WHO to rank it the best in the world. But does that mean that Canadians me would end up supporting some of Bush’s proposals to reform healthcare? Blasphemous!