OTTAWA - Canadians think their American neighbours would be wise to look north as they grapple with a massive health-care overhaul.
That's the conclusion drawn from a new poll published as Capitol Hill legislators debate a plan to cover nearly all Americans with government-run health insurance.
The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey suggests 82 per cent of Canadians believe our system is better than U.S. health care.
The Canadian health-care system has been in the spotlight for weeks at congressional hearings, where it has alternately been characterized as the gold standard and a rusty system plagued with problems and delays.
By the end of the month, the House of Representatives hopes to vote on a health reform plan, and U.S. President Barack Obama has said he wants legislation by October.
Last week, the two leaders of the Senate health committee announced that they'd come up with a government-run insurance option to compete with private insurance plans.
The plan carries a US$611-billion price tag -- cheaper than the original $1 trillion estimate -- and is supposed to cover 97 per cent of Americans.
Currently, 47 million U.S. citizens -- mostly the poor -- have none. The U.S. also has the highest health-care costs of any country in the industrialized world.
Those figures might explain Canadians' preference for their own health-care system, said Harris-Decima vice-president Jeff Walker.
"I think what's happened over the last year or two is that even more problems associated with the U.S. health-care system have come to light," he said.
"President Obama has certainly put them at the centre of his agenda to deal with problems in that system.
"I think there's a growing sense that going fully private, or having some version of an almost fully private model like the American one, doesn't necessarily serve the broader interest the way Canadians would want it to be served."
More residents in Quebec than any other province preferred the U.S. system, with nearly a fifth of Quebecers saying American health care is superior.
That may be due to more difficult spots in La Belle Province, where many lack a general practitioner or feel their emergency-care is lacking, Walker suggested.
"There are more touch points in the Quebec health-care system where there seem to be problems than we observe in Ontario and other parts of the country," he said.
The poll also suggests 70 per cent of Canadians think their health-care system is working well or very well, while the remainder feel the system is either not working well or not working well at all.
Quebec residents were most split, with 52 per cent saying the system works well and 43 per cent saying it doesn't.
Canadians were also divided over how much of their system should be publicly funded and how much should be private.
Fifty-five per cent thought it should be more public, only 12 per cent thought it should be private, and the rest thought Canada has struck the right balance between the two options.
The telephone poll of 1,000 Canadians was conducted from June 4 to 8, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
