As a Canadian, that's the bizarre thing I've found about the American system.  The US spends more per capita on Medicare than Canadians do on healthcare - you'd think they would want to try to fix that before they tried to "extend coverage" and force everyone to participate in a public system.  I should point out further though that the Canadian model is less than sustainable.  As I've mentioned to others in the past, it took me over 6 months to book a physical and unless you know people access to specialists is a very lengthy wait.