Did you miss the smiley? ;)

>>Canadian medicare works because the it pays doctors in the US to provide care. ;)
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>Well, lets read Wikipedia on the subject (I know the reference will be challenged, we all hate it when it says something contrary to what we think, and I agree some of it is anecdotal)
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>So, apparently 0.25% of Canadians make medicare work by traveling to the US to get care.
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>This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this section if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. (January 2008)
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>Canadians visiting the US to receive health care
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>Some residents of Canada travel to the United States because it provides the nearest facility for their needs. Some do so on quality grounds or because of easier access. A study by Barer, et al., indicates that the majority of Canadians who seek health care in the U.S. are already there for other reasons, including business travel or vacations. A smaller proportion seek care in the U.S. for reasons of confidentiality, including abortions, mental illness, substance abuse, and other problems that they may not wish to divulge to their local physician, family, or employer.
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> Canadians offered free care in the US paid by the Canadian government have sometimes declined it. In 1990 the British Columbia Medical Association ran radio ads asking, "What's the longest you'd wait in line at a bank before getting really annoyed? Five minutes? Ten minutes? What if you needed a heart operation?" Following this, the government responded, as summarized by Robin Hutchinson, senior medical consultant for the health ministry's heart program. Despite the medically questionable nature of heart bypass for milder cases of chest pain and follow-up studies showing heart bypass recipients were only 25-40% more likely to be relieved of chest pain than people who stay on heart medicine, the "public outcry" following the ads led the government to take action:
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> "'We did a deal with the University of Washington at Seattle' said Hutchinton.. to take 50 bypass cases at $18,000 per head, almost $3,000 higher than the cost in Vancouver, with all the money [paid by] the province..In theory, the Seattle operations promised to take the heat off the Ministry of Health until a fourth heart surgery unit opened in the Vancouver suburb of New Westminster. If the first batch of Seattle bypasses went smoothly..then the government planned to buy three or four more 50-head blocks. But four weeks after announcing the plan, health administrators had to admit they were stumped. 'As of now..we've have nine people sign up. The opposition party, the press, everybody's making a big stink about our waiting lists. And we've got [only] nine people signed up! The surgeons ask their patients and they say, "I'd rather wait", We thought we could get maybe two hundred and fifty done down in Seattle..but if nobody wants to go to Seattle, we're stuck,'".[73]
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> In a Canadian National Population Health Survey of 17,276 Canadian residents, it was reported that only 0.5% sought medical care in the US in the previous year. Of these, less than a quarter had traveled to the U.S. expressly to get that care.[74]
> A 2002 study by Katz, Cardiff, et al., reported the number of Canadians using U.S. services to be "barely detectible relative to the use of care by Canadians at home" and that the results "do not support the widespread perception that Canadian residents seek care extensively in the United States."[75]
> According to a September 14, 2007, article from CTV News, Canadian Liberal MP Belinda Stronach went to the United States for breast cancer surgery in June 2007. Stronach's spokesperson Greg MacEachern was quoted in the article saying that the US was the best place to have this type of surgery done. Stronach paid for the surgery out of her own pocket.[76] Prior to this incident, Stronach had stated in an interview that she was against two-tiered health care.[77]
> When Robert Bourassa, the premier of Quebec, needed cancer treatment, he went to the US to get it.[78]
> In 2007, it was reported that Canada sent scores of pregnant women to the US to give birth.[79] In 2007 a woman from Calgary who was pregnant with quadruplets was sent to Great Falls, Montana to give birth. An article on this incident states there were no Canadian hospitals with enough neo-natal intensive beds to accommodate the extremely rare quadruple birth.[80]
> A January 19, 2008, article in The Globe and Mail states, "More than 150 critically ill Canadians – many with life-threatening cerebral hemorrhages – have been rushed to the United States since the spring of 2006 because they could not obtain intensive-care beds here. Before patients with bleeding in or outside the brain have been whisked through U.S. operating-room doors, some have languished for as long as eight hours in Canadian emergency wards while health-care workers scrambled to locate care." [81]
> In 2010, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams traveled to the US for heart surgery.[82]
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>In 2005 Shona Holmes of Waterdown, Ontario, traveled to the Mayo Clinic after deciding she couldn't afford to wait for appointments with specialists through the Ontario health care system.[83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90] She has characterized her condition as an emergency, said she was losing her sight, and portrayed her condition as life-threatening brain cancer. OHIP did not reimburse her for her medical expenses. In 2007 she joined a lawsuit to force the Ontario government to reimburse patients who feel they had to travel outside of Canada for timely, life-saving medical treatment. In July 2009 Holmes agreed to appear in television ads broadcast in the United States warning Americans of the dangers of adopting a Canadian style health care system. After her ad appeared critics pointed out discrepancies in her story, including that Rathke's cleft cyst, the condition she was treated for, was not a form of cancer, and was not life-threatening.[91][92] In fact, the mortality rate for patients with a Rathke's cleft cyst is zero percent. [93]
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>US citizens visiting Canada to receive health care
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>On the other hand, some US citizens travel to Canada for health-care related reasons:
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> Many US citizens purchase prescription drugs from Canada, either over the Internet or by traveling there to buy them in person, because prescription drug prices in Canada are substantially lower than prescription drug prices in the United States; this cross-border purchasing has been estimated at $1 billion annually.[94]
> Because medical marijuana is legal in Canada but illegal in most of the US, many US citizens suffering from cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and glaucoma have traveled to Canada for medical treatment. One of those is Steve Kubby, the Libertarian Party's 1998 candidate for governor of California, who is suffering from adrenal cancer.[95] Recent legal changes such as Proposition 215 may decrease this type of medical tourism from California only.
> Sarah Palin, in an appearance in Calgary, told her audience that her family once used the Canadian health-care system,[96] before the Canada Health Act although she says it was in the 60s, when the Canadian healthcare system was beginning to reform.
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>Also an interesting table:
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>Country 	 	Life		Infant mortality  	Physicians per  Nurses  	per Per capita		Healthcare costs 	% of government 	% of health costs
> 	 		expectancy 	rate			1000 people	1000 people	expenditure (USD)	as a percent of GDP 	revenue spent on health  paid by government
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>Canada 	 	 	81.3 	 	 	4.5 	 	 	2.2 	 	 9.0 	 	 	3,895 	 	 10.1 	 	 	16.7 	 	 	69.8
>US 	 	 	78.1 	 	 	6.9 	 	 	2.4 	 	 10.6 	 	 	7,290 	 	 16.0 	 	 	18.5 	 	 	45.4
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>Basically all those numbers are not good to defend the American Healthcare system, less life expectancy, more infant mortality rate, better number of doctors and nurses as the only bright spot, per capita expenditure just terrible as well as all the other numbers, specially if you see the health costs paid by government, if you look at the % it looks better, but when you apply it to the per capita expenditure the government in Canada ends paying around 2727 and USA government pays around 3310, with no apparent improvement whatsoever, and having millions of un-insured people.