Learn from others' mistakes. It's cheaper (and safer).

Claude Castonguay, the man known as "the Father of Quebec Medicare" and who spearheaded the idea of socialized medicine in Canada, has now admitted that the whole scheme has been a colossal failure:

"'We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,' says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: 'We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.'"

Imagine that. Letting people make their own health care decisions is "radical" to him, but an idea now worth trying, because his first stab at controlling health care bombed so spectacularly. Imagine being this woman:

"Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.
The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires' case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn't properly filled out a form. At death's door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better."

Still want to have minimally educated bureaucrats decide what type and how much treatment you receive, based on nothing more than some sort of flowchart, or how well one fills out the reams of paperwork while dealing with a life-threatening disease? Where will Americans go for their own competent treatment once they adopt Canada's style of health care? Mexico? India?

Let's not allow Obama-like politicians to repeat the mistakes of our northern neighbor, but rather encourage our fearless leaders to learn from the failed Canadian experiment in socialized medicine.