"Upscale" wrote in message
...

"Tim Daneliuk" wrote in message
but no one wants to hear them ... they're too busy demanding
"free" healthcare ...

Well, I have to admit, you are the quintessential bulldog refusing to
relinquish your grip for any reason. Your teeth are embedded into the word
"free". It's NOT free, it's health insurance paid for by the citizens and
collected by employers. Only difference to your private insurance system
is
that it's a much larger system and it's administered by the government.

First, the Canadian system is not by any means larger than the private
insurance system in the US. Approximately 2/3 of US citizens have private
health insurance, which works out to about 200 million people. Last I
checked, Canada's population is about 33 million.

And if you bothered to look into it, that minimum wage for health
insurance
premium exemption is pretty low. ($20,000) in Ontario, Canada. That
leaves
a huge lot of people over the $20,000 threshold who do pay for it. The
maximum one would pay is $900 a year, even if they're billionaires.

In 2004, there were 47 million people on Medicaid. If $900/person/year
covered the costs, Medicaid would have cost $42 billion. The US spent $295
billion. Scale that up to 305 million people and let me know what the price
tag will be.

todd