In the United States, for every person providing a direct medical service there is a host of clerks parsing the bill. We don't pay for that army of clerks in Canada. Those people are applying their bookkeeping skills in other, more productive businesses. Our medical expenses are, in fact, medical expenses.
Single payer health insurance distributes individual medical risk across the entire population without the added overhead of pointless administrative and legal quarrelling over exactly who will pay for which part- because in the end we all pay anyway.
Besides radically reducing the cost of health care and improving the quality available to everyone, there are other, perhaps more important, advantages to these improvements.
Do Americans imagine that it costs them nothing to allow other Americans to grow up physically handicapped or poorly educated? That they can maintain a healthy, competitive, capitalist economy this way? Apparently they do.
