Canadian healthcare: a fair-minded assessment

Here's JJ McCullough with one of the saner looks at Canadian healthcare that I've seen:

Canadians, who are always reflexively looking for ways to make their country seem superior to America (a neurotic tendency that McCullough confirms), love to talk about their healthcare versus US healthcare. I have no trouble admitting that US healthcare is exorbitantly expensive, but as that long-ago article pointed out, South Korean healthcare is so much cheaper than US healthcare because it went a more free-market route. Introduce greater privatization and competition, and costs will naturally go down while quality will go up. If the US were to try such a strategy, there'd be immediate improvement in prices. In Korea, the problem is often the quality of care. McCullough, meanwhile, notes a problem with Canadian healthcare that other Americans have picked up on: long wait times, even for problems as severe as cancer. A cancer can go from treatable to untreatable in the months it takes to see a proper doctor. That's positively medieval.