Don't get me wrong

I love our Canadian neighbors and our Canadian knitbloggers and I would certainly join them in a chorus of "O Canada" on July 1. However, the crowing about their "National Health Care" and labeling it "working" is just untenable.

First, the financing of their health care system is possible only because Canada has eviscerated its military and depends on the shield and buckler of the US military for much of its security. Although there are some plans in place to beef up the miniscule 60K active duty force, this is a tiny number of the people it should take to defend the large territory that Canada occupies. Proof of this is that the Canadian forces had trouble supplying replacement troops for the 850 people they sent to Afghanistan after their rotation was over. Imagine a country the size of Canada and they have so few troops that they had trouble rotating less than 1,000 personnel.

As for the working part of the health care system up there, I had an older relative here in the US just get knee replacement surgery in less than 3 weeks from the time it was determined that it was needed. There were other medical factors that slowed the process down by a week or the surgery would have been done even earlier. Contrast this with the fate of a grandmother of an acquaintance, who spent 6 months wheelchair bound waiting to get on the list to have knee repair (repair, NOT replacement) and finally gave up and crossed the border and paid cash to aUS doctor and hospital to do the job. Of course, the US doctors said a repair would only fend off a knee replacement by a couple of years, but in the Canadian system, she'd have waited another 6 months for the "repair" then when that failed in 2 years, she'd be on the waiting list for a replacement and God only knows how long you have to wait for a knee replacement. Maybe the notion is that she would die of old age in the wheelchair before the taxpayers had to fund the knee replacement.

Not to say there isn't plenty that could be better about the US health care model - for example, the fact that too many people use emergency facilities for minor injuries and illnesses is frustrating. We need to have urgent care clinics that can handle things like a severe ear infection at 2 a.m. or a hand cut open on a broken glass at 4 p.m. on Sunday without bothering the ER. Our military medical system used to do this very well, separating real emergencies from things that need care with some urgency, but don't require ER facilities. Apparently the civilian model mostly doesn't.

And I say all this as a private citizen with a chronic illness who has been occasionally uninsured and had to muddle through.