It's also about national unity and creating some kind of moral anchor for our country. Keeping Canada together is something that we're always worrying about, and while the US has also had unity issues, ours are different enough that we've evolved a complicated bunch of things -- sometimes planned, sometimes accidental -- to keep ourselves together. Like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation -- I guess the nearest US equivalent is PBS and NPR -- but they operate in a much different way than the CBC. It's not just a television network to us.
Some links about how Medicare got started up here:
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-73-851/politics_economy/tommy_douglas/(Tommy Douglas, by the way, was Kiefer Sutherland's grandpa)
http://www.mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1545http://www.healthcoalition.ca/health-index.htmlI know some Americans say we have "free health care", but actually we do pay for it out of our taxes. It amounts to a subsidized public insurance system. And (unlike the national card system proposed by Bill Clinton) the provinces have responsibility. (Canadian provinces generally have more political power than the American states do -- because of the way our constitution was written.) So it's not quite the Stalinist monolith it's made out to be.
Medicare, for us, began on the Prairies -- the people who designed it were thinking of mutual assistance in times of need, church suppers (yes, Tommy Douglas was a Baptist minister who ran what Americans today would call a "faith-based charity") and that whole ethic. Not some theoretical concoction from a bunch of Marxist academics at some eastern university. So Canadians don't have as much of a reflexive negative response to the concept of "socialized" anything. Publically-owned corporations that look after mass transit, auto insurance, electrical power, etc., just weren't seen in that way by most of us. Sure, they're not perfect, but after seeing the fallout from privatization (e.g. skyrocketing power rates, and the contaminated water tragedy in Walkerton), many Canadians see them as vital services that should stay in the public trust. Nationwide polls put "funding Medicare and the Canada Pension Plan" ahead of paying down the debt (and even tax cuts!).
My point is, it's very hard to transfer an entire way of thinking into another country. When conservative commentators say that copying the Canadian style won't work in the US, I'm inclined to agree. If the US does come up with a plan, it may not be universal -- and evidently the Kerry-Edwards proposal isn't (95%). Universality is something that's important for us, because of the national unity thing -- but US has been getting away from that, and not even school standards or the draft are imposed across the entire population. Because of the much stronger distrust of anything "socialized", I can see why US health care advocates would back off on anything approaching that.
p.s. what Daleo said earlier -- it's interesting that even the right-wing parties up here don't dare say that they want to get rid of Medicare. (Instead, they say they want to "enhance" and "streamline" it, then if they do get into power, they cut it to the point where they can claim it isn't working.) Even Prime Minister Mulroney found that it doesn't pay to go after social programmes in public (his own mom showed up on a protest picket line to defend the pension plan!).
We do get to pick our own doctors. And it does take away a lot of the worry about being bankrupted by illness. People I know who wouldn't have been able to afford cancer surgeries, transplants, etc. are living healthy and debt-free today.
I needed that public funding a lot when I was a "preemie" baby. With good nutrition and exercise (thanks to mom, a public health nurse) I became healthy enough that I haven't needed to draw on the insurance much. I've probably paid in more than I've used, so far during my life -- but the point is that I haven't had to worry, the way some of my US friends have. And my payment premiums are lower (many of them can't afford any insurance at all). Best of all, I don't have to depend on my employer to "look after" me in that sense -- and people I know who have small businesses don't need to provide health insurance for their workers, which simplifies things for them as well.