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is that the amount of money spent on it attracts doctors and researchers from all over. On the cutting edge of health care, the US sets a high standard. The huge trade-off is, obviously, that the other 99% of health care - treating the health needs of the middle and working classes on a daily basis - our system is a failure.
This Canadian had just had knee surgery a couple of months ago. While he was very happy with the quality of the surgery and care he received (he has good insurance, of course), but couldn't stop talking about the expense and paperwork of dealing with the American health care system.
I asked him why Canadians (his wife is Canadian, too) would move to the US (they both have green cards). He is French Canadian and left Quebec (he claims that many other left Quebec too) because he felt that the Parti Quebecois was trying to wall the province off from the rest of the country and world.
He first moved to Vancouver, met his wife there, then they moved to Phoenix and now to the Dayton, Ohio area. She is a college professor and he's an agronomist. He said they left Phoenix because his wife (whose parents immigrated to Canada from the Philippines) was being mistaken for Hispanic and didn't want to live there any more. Nothing dramatically bad had happened to her, but she didn't feel welcome. They've lived here for four month now and she doesn't feel the same subtle (in her case) hostility. While she had never lived in Quebec, the husband believed that Arizona was turning inward in a manner comparable to the way that the Quebecois had wanted to do in the past and had become unwelcoming to "outsiders".
He said that Americans don't understand how much lower taxes are here than in Canada, but he firmly believe that Canadians were happier with government because they believed that higher taxes they paid were a good investment in better government services.
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