[merrylander]

Having family back there (Geez do I have family back there, there are some 45 families with the same surname and they are either direct family or cousins at some remove) I can only go by their experience. All I know for sure is that their first hand experiences do not match the horror stories I read. Most of which I attribute to the fact that Pharma spends approx $30 billion a year on TV and print advertising, so I would expect that the media will not bite the hand that feeds them.

I gather that there is squabbling between the provincial governments and the central government regarding who is to raise taxes to cover rising costs but it was ever that way. As my next door neighbor when I lived there described a politician. He is a person who watches a group of people moving along and just as the get tired and are about to stop and rest, he runs to the front of the line and says "See the nice place to which I have led you."

Some years back a group of doctors in Alberta asked the government to buy them an MRI machine. The government responded, "We are simply the insurer if you feel that you can make such a machine pay for itself go ahead and buy one." You see despite what people believe it is not socialized medicine, they are the insurer so when was the last time Aetna or US Healthcare bought an MRI machine for anyone.

But as I am fond of saying most Americans would not recognize a socialist if one bit them on the arse.

It has faults as it is slow to approve new forms of treatment for coverage, but then our own FDA is not exactly known for its speed. The drugs there are the same drugs, from the same companies as here, just more fairly priced. I find it somewhat insulting when the FDA said we could not trust drugs from Canada, then turns around and allowed that compound from China used in a drug here that killed some people. When a people will poison their own babies for profit how could the FDA have possibly trusted any ingredients from there.