[ska]

Having lived and worked in the health care industry in both countries, I'll have to respectively disagree. I can see how your personal experience must be very frustrating, and I'm not attempting to belittle that.

However on the whole the Canadian system is better at delivering the health care that is needed. Overall, it works better for more people, more of the time, and much more efficiently (i.e. cost effectively). The latter point means that sometimes people with non-critical issues have to wait -- usually not very long notwithstanding the stories people sometimes focus on (the dramatic failure modes of the US system are much, much worse).

That being said, if you a) have the right insurance, b) live in the right state, c) have money, and d) live in the right part (typically urban) of the state -- you can get very good care very quickly in the US. Unfortunately that leaves out an awful lot of people.