Us Canadians, we’re kind of understated by nature,” Marcus Davies told me. “We don’t go around chanting ‘We’re No. 1!’ But you know, there are two areas where we feel superior to the US—hockey and healthcare.”

Davies is an official of the Saskatchewan Medical Society but that feeling of patriotic pride in the nation’s health-care system is something that just about all Canadians share. They love to point out that Canada provides coverage for everybody—while the US leaves tens of millions of its citizens uninsured. They love to remind us that while the US lets some 700,000 people go bankrupt due to medical bills each year, the number of medical bankruptcies in Canada is zero.

I reminded Davies that Canada does an admirable job of providing free and prompt care to anybody with an acute medical condition, but for non-emergency cases, the system often provides nothing but a long wait. “We keep people waiting,” Davies said, “to limit costs. Canadians don’t mind waiting for elective care all that much, so long as the rich Canadian and the poor Canadian have to wait about the same amount of time.”

Thus, Davies had set forth the national ethic of healthcare in his country: medicine is not a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, but a right that must be distributed equitably to one and all. In short, the Canadians have a health-care system that neatly fits the Canadian character: ferociously egalitarian, but thrifty.

I found that same pattern—a health-care system that reflects a nation’s basic cultural values—everywhere I went for a PBS documentary and a book on how wealthy countries provide healthcare. “The fundamental truth about healthcare in every country,” notes Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt, one of the world’s pre-eminent health-care economists, “is that national values, national character, determine how each system works”.

... contd.