>It will truly be interesting when Americans and Canadians start traveling to India for medical care...
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>I've heard some espouse a NAFTA agreement that would require a world-wide minimum wage (it would supposedly be set by cost-of-living per country so the amount would be different in every country) signed by all NAFTA participants. Interesting what the effect of that would be! Many corporations shifted overseas to other countries also simply because those countries have national healthcare so the corporation doesn't have to bear the cost as they do here.

From what I remember, the cost of health insurance was divided 50:50 between the employee and the employer. However, it was drastically cheaper than supporting all the paper pushers in HMOs and all the costs hospitals build, because they all have to have the latest machinery. We had one CAT scanner for the whole region of about 200,000 people, and it was working full time. I've heard of a case where a dozen hospitals in the same area (in Seattle, if I recall correctly) have them, and they are operating below 20% capacity. But they had to be paid 100%... which trickles down to the overall cost. And of course, the cost of malpractice insurance... you name it. IOW, it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be managed better if it's in private hands. The same recipe doesn't necessarily apply to all sorts of pies. There are all sorts of reason why Canada, for instance, has about 50% of the per capita cost of health care when compared to USA, and yet everyone's covered.