If you want health care like Canada, you would have to be taxed accordingly.
There are downsides to our system that you would have to live with. Need an MRI? 6 month wait. Cancer screenings and interventions can take a long time (sometimes fatally so).
Many people in Canada don't trust our system when it comes to dealing with potentially life ending disorders and will pony up the cash to go to the US for immediate intervention. Diagnosed on Monday, cancer free by Friday. If they wait for our system, it's diagnosed Monday, maybe cancer free in a few months.
Canadians are also at the whims of determinants of health just like anyone else. Impoverished families still do not get equal access to health care here for a variety of reasons. Lack education, no money for meds, bad health seeking habits, lack of community supports etc.
Our system is mired with inefficiency and health care workers are often times over worked and underpaid.
We tend to have cycles of brain drain where health care professionals leave the country in order to get better paying work. In the late 80s to early 90s, it was nurses who were going to the US for better paying jobs and working conditions. Because of that, plus the bulk of Canadian baby-boomer nurses retiring, we have a near critical shortage of nurses. For the last decade, the brain drain has been physician based. If you don't have a family physician, it can take some voodoo to find one.
Our system has also enabled people to be lazy with their health seeking. Instead of being proactive in their health, the bulk of us just exist until something gives, and then seek help because we know it is there. This may sound comforting, but it has lead to a situation where people with totally manageable conditions are going to hospitals for even the smallest issues that are easily dealt with. It also means that diseases of excess (hypertension, T2 Diabetes, etc.) are on the rise because people don't realize how dangerous these conditions are, and if they do get them, we will fix them.
Meds are still not paid for unless you are on some form of medical insurance. Many of the jobs in Canada are shit jobs that don't offer benefits. Like anywhere else, unskilled labour is becoming the norm for people with little education. If they work, they still cannot afford the insurance plans that are around.
Canada has "premium" rooms, and other bonuses that people with money can get, so the equal access to care thing is a bit of a misnomer. MRI and other diagnostic tests can be had quickly if you have the cash. Don't have the cash? Tough tits, you have to wait.
Where do we go from here?
Canada's system worked well for a long time, but we are nearing a point where it is going to be completely ineffective. Acute care centers are now on a push to come up with patient teaching programs in order to empower them to deal with conditions at home. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease is getting a big push because COPD exacerbation is the number one cause of hospital admit (in Ontario at least). COPD is a VERY manageable condition if the patient possesses a modicum of knowledge about it.
I believe health care is going to go through a paradigm shift where more home based care for chronic illness is indicated, and hospitals are only used for acute or emergency conditions. The indicators are there. What effect this will have on health care wages and brain drain, I don't know.
Implications for the US health care system.
I think that if the US tries to set up a system that mirrors Canada now, it is doomed to fail. They will be implementing a system that is not forward thinking, and arguably very outdated. Obama care is not really an effective step in the right direction. Health care systems as a whole would have to come together and draft a plan. Doctors have to take some hits, nurses have to take some hits. Health care is big business, but it needs to be a big business with a strong ethical backbone, which is often not the case.
Having a centralized Government come up with a bill and ram it down everyone's throats is going to achieve very little, and may end up harming the process in the end. Healthcare is a much more complex equation that that.