27 June 2019 - Canadians have long viewed their single payer health care system with a near-religious reverence, largely because they assume that the United States will never adopt a similarly generous system. 

Games of compare-and-contrast determine Canada’s national virtues, and on health care the prevailing theory is that Americans are simply not as charitable and open-minded. In a 2017 editorial on Canadian Medicare superiority, for instance, the Globe and Mail dismissed the Affordable Care Act — popularly known as Obamacare — as a mere “baby-step toward universal health care.”

The problem with this sort of patriotic framing is that Canada’s health-care system is itself the culmination of many long-forgotten “baby-steps,” and would almost certainly never be created in its present form today.

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