Louis is so many subjects you are so well informed and articulate but when it comes to Canadian Medical you are woefully misinformed. You must be getting your information from American right wing publications, otherwise I don’t know how you are honestly making these claims. Yes the Canadian System is expensive and it is not perfect but then what invented by man and operated by bureaucracy is not? Every Canadian is covered 100% the same as every other Canadian living in the same province (you see the system is run by the individual provinces under the guidelines and financial help of the federal government) Yes of course in a private medical facility the system works faster because it is not trying to service the masses, and yes some provinces are introducing a dual layered system that will allow private medical practices to operate. This is simply an attempt to service those that can afford to pay and not wait.

I know that one of the services that is offered as private as well as public is Cat-scan. If the situation is not life threatening then yes there is a wait period simply because in most hospital they are operating those expensive units 24/7/365. However, is the doctor feels that time is of the essence then one gets a scan within two days, I know from personal experience because twice in the past six months I have had to have a Cat-scan and was booked in my local hospital with two days of the order being written by my doctor and that is as an out-patient, if you are already in the hospital you receive the scan within hours.

In my lifetime (70 years) I have been kept alive by your “taming o-f the queue” system. I have been hospitalized with different, various life threatening diseases over my lifetime and I have never been kept waiting an unreasonable period of time. These treatments in America would have cost literally millions of dollars and neither I nor my family would have been able to afford even a small percentage of those charges.

Now a very brief summation, I have lived on worked off and on in lifetime in America and have many dear friends there. This is the story of two of my best friends. The first was a top entertainment lawyer and happened to go into a top hospital the same day that I went into a brand new Canadian hospital. We both were suffering from a new, unknown disease that had originated in America and was killing almost everyone that contracted it. This disease, Legionaries Disease had killed Jim Henson of Sesame Street fame. I was telling the triage nurse about my symptoms and the many doctors that had been unable to help me. A young doctor was walking past the nurse’s desk and overheard my symptoms. I passed out at the nurses station and ended up waking up two days later to be informed that my disease was the brand new Legionaries Disease and that the doctor that had overheard my symptoms and had recently read an obscure medical report on the disease and recognized what it was and how to treat it. My friend entering the top American hospital ? Well he died, they had misdiagnosed the disease and treated it as pneumonia which only aggravated the disease. My other good friend is a wife and mother living in Georgia, she has not had a pap smear since the birth of her daughter who is 15 and the don’t have medical insurance even though they both work, she working for the Post Office as a postman on a rural route.

So which country looks after its poor and disadvantaged better?