I vacationed there for a few days in June, and returned home shaking my head, and thinking wow, we are falling behind. I felt really poor, even buying a cup of Tim Horton's coffee. And I make a 'good' salary!!!

"Quality of Life" surveys, in which Canada routinely surpasses the U.S. Life expectancy, education, health care, secularity, good pot and beer, immigration, GLBT issues, positive international reputation,....

'til Harper reverses all that....

that kinda says it doesn't it

The range of costs I have seen for a couple or family of three is between $4000 -$8000 per year through a combination of premiums, deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance. For non disclosure reasons I can't name the insurance companies.

A Canadian family of four or more pays $1452 per year total for all family members. No deductibles except for drugs up to $2100 after that no deductible for drugs either. Other than that no out of pocket costs such as co-pays and co-insurance.

I am disabled so I pay nothing. No insurance premiums and my drugs which run about $10000 per year are free also.

What that means is that a middle class US family has to earn $10,000 more per year to be at the same standard of living as a Canadian family at the same income level. That's excluding drug costs if my gross calculations are correct.

The most important feature of Canadian health care costs is that companies do not have to contribute a cent towards their employees healthcare. That's why US companies like to open branch plants here. With NAFTA they save billions by not having to match employee contributions to their healthcare.

Another interesting fact, Canada has been threatened with challenges under NAFTA on the grounds that the Canadian government subsidizes the Canadian worker. That's also why the US right wing has the long term goal of forcing the Canadian government to allow private insurance companies back into the market.

said what is going on.... She was gone when we transitioned into HMO's.. A remedy for all our health care dollar waste..

Single payer health care. A good education system. A financial sector that was prevented from going totally insane as to ruin the economy. Sounds like good governance to me!

Every penny that comes in from oil sales helps the country as a whole. No one ugly businessman gets all the profit: Everyone shares the profit.

Makes alot of sense to me.

Right.

But, yes, it would make sense if they did.

"Martin also slashed funding to social programs. He foresaw that crippling deficits imperiled Canada’s education and health- care systems, which even his Conservative predecessor, Brian Mulroney, described as a “sacred trust.” He cut corporate taxes, too."

They did cut funding initially (and there were huge protests) but as soon as the deficit was gone they reinstated the social spending - so it didn't go away forever and didn't have much to do with the current state of the economy except for a few years of budget surpluses helped cut the debt. And our corporate tax rate is much lower than the US but there are fewer loopholes.

See, Canada is very Keynesian. That is the general macro policy they follow. The difference between the US and Canada is Canada has the foresight to try to cool overheated markets instead of trying to accelerate the growth (which results in a large crash). The business cycle is tempered in Canada, which is the whole purpose of Keynes - to avoid the boom and bust cycle. It's the main reason why Canada has weathered the crash so well, imo.

Since most people's greatest asset is their home that's enormously important. Not that I have a problem with most of their policies, but you have to adjust for the differential in housing costs before you compare personal wealth.

Isn't that great that regulation and protecting the consumer and economy has helped this country thrive? Imagine what kind of money we would all have if we were not paying into the insurance gambit so we could have decent health care.

And OUR money is the right color!!!

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And we don't have menacing figures in arches on our money! Or birdwatchers!

I remember talking to a Canadian some time back about the American knee jerk terror of anything with the word socialism attached to it. My opinion was that it was part of the Cold War era indoctrination.

I went over such things as when we were children in single digit ages trained to do the KYA goodbye position at school and give all the gruesome descriptions given us how we would die horribly from nuclear bombs being dropped on us and why. They made lists of who would be allowed to walk home to be with our parents, and would have to die at school and never see them again.

I told him about the backyard bomb shelters. But I didn't hold it against the 'reds' for doing such a thing. I thought about the games adults play. It made some of us fatalistic and a reason for the tune in, turn on, drop out generation. After all, we were all going to die for this insanity, but it had a name, no longer the Axis powers of WW2. The name was socialism and had to be resisted or die.

He thought a few seconds and said to me, rather sadly, 'You know, I didn't grow up with that. We kind of let your country go at that alone. We should have gotten more involved with you and maybe Americans would not be so crazy now.'

Maybe we can stop the insanity.

republicans - "REGULATION of business AND of the banking system, low healthcare costs, fair taxation, an open-door immigration policy".

I can see Canada from my house.

OK, not really, but I can see Canada from a street I drive down on an almost daily basis. I can even see wind turbines over there and I wonder why they have so much more wind on that side of the boarder that it makes economic sense to put them over there but not to put them over here.

I'd love to be all smug Canadian here, but we have a government that is doing its best to transfer money from the middle class to corporations.

For now, though, Canada definitely has a more robust middle class than the US, and in many ways, our Conservative government is still left of the Democrats.

The Harper government is as right as the bush regime was and no wonder. Harper is a bush wannabe and a fucking religious neocon.

Harper is a Bush wannabe, certainly, but he can't actually do everything he wants without committing political suicide.

of the Democrats", very different in fact.

Because his government can't, as yet anyway, do everything he wants doesn't mean he and his cabal wouldn't if they could and what they would do is in NO WAY left of the Democrats in ANY way.

I agree that Harper is personally not left of the Dems.

The reality is Harper AND his cabal are right of the Democrats, far to the right of them.

Canadian drugs are cheaper than those sold in the U.S.

Why?

Straight from the horse's mouth: because Americans have more money and they can pay more.

This was said by a speaker at a pharmaceutical industry conference which I covered as part of my job as a writer/editor in the pharmaceutical industry (no longer employed in that capacity).

So if this is the case, they need to reverse that policy and now charge Canadians more and Americans less.


Cher

has power and in no F'en way are those holding the American purse strings interested in the US and the welfare of the citizens, other than how they can exhort more money from the country.

And many Americans still don't get what's going on, and are willing accomplices in aggrandizing the wealth of the few while many Americans, about 50%, live in poverty or on the edge of poverty, and about 25% of the children go hungry. Too many Americans have their heads in the sand or up their asses and will vote in many republicans and blue-dog democrats, saying, ain't America great.