Sara Robinson does us all a nice service with an article detonating various myths about Canadian health care. It's a good piece, and fair, too. She doesn't deny that there are some long waits (and she adds an interesting twist to the situation, saying, "the farther north you live, the harder it is to get to care, simply because the doctors and hospitals are concentrated in the south") or that Canadian doctors make less money than their American counterparts. But nor does she deny the overwhelming evidence that, for about half as much money, Canada has built a better health system than we have. I'm particularly interested in the ninth myth she identifies, that "people won't be responsible for their own health if they're not being forced to pay for the consequences." This underlies a lot of conservative commentary on on health care but it is not, so far as I can figure out, particularly true. After all, Americans pay much more out of pocket for health services, and we are much, much less healthy than residents of nations with nationalized health care. Now, I don't think health care delivery systems are the causal variable there -- culture, and walkability, and food subsidies, and pollution, and stress, and a million other forces intervene -- but it sure doesn't seem that our attempts to motivate health behavior by dangling financial ruin have done much good.
