Rationing in the Canadian Medicare system

[Maria Gilmore]

In discussion of universal health insurance issues, I've heard it claimed
that it's impossible to compare American and Canadian systems because our
social environments are different; the Canadians are willing to accept
things Americans are not, and vice versa.   One claim made:  in Canada there
is a lot of rationing of heroic care to the elderly, which means if you're
over 65, you just don't get heroic measures to keep you alive; even getting
a bed in an ICU won't happen.   Anything to this?  I haven't been able to
find any official statements about rationing in my research so far, and it
seems to me that we'd have heard something about it if the Canadian elderly
were being treated this way nationwide and as a matter of course.  The
argument continues: this constitutes a big difference between US attitudes
about end-of-life issues and those of those north of us, since the great
majority of people in any American ICU tend to be people in their 70s and on
up; a big hunk of the huge expenditures we make for medical care goes for
the horrendously expensive effort to keep very old, very sick people alive.
Of course there's the implicit assumption that it would be impossible to
fund a system well enough to guarantee everyone in it state of the art care
no matter what their condition.   The only way the Canadian system can
function is by making people wait, or by outright rationing of care, mostly
by age at this point...and they seem to be living with that...whereas upper
and middleclass Americans seem to be able to accept rationing by financial
resources, but might not get on board for letting Grandma (or ourselves, for
that matter, as we are a graying population) go without every last stop
being pulled out.

Any Canadians with imput on this?