> The issue of health care showing that Canadians see a
> problem like this as something to be solved by all of
> society ...
Well, it does also nicely let companies off the hook for paying for it. It's not "free" you know, it gets paid for by income taxes. So maybe you mean "something to be solved by all of tax-paying society" (and see below for some more fun stats).
> If you feel you are a part of society rather than a collection
> of competing individuals you might be less likely to shoot
> someone. Certainly not a crackpot idea.
Hah! I think that's just about the definition of a crackpot theory. In the US you're most likely to shoot someone if you're a criminal and a crime you're comitting is going wrong or if your criminal enterprise is threatened either by competition or by a potential witness going against you. The next big identifyable group of people who shoot other people are domestic violence type cases, and that's like 7% (about 1300 last year, already way down in the noise of "things happening to an indentifyable part of the population").
WAY WAY WAY WAY down there is people who do it because of some vague feeling that they are part of a collection of competing individuals. And to tie this back to the original crackpot theory, nobody knows why most of the extremely few people who go out in a blaze of bullets against their classmates or churchmates: least of all anyone here on this list.
Anyway, the Canadian system isn't some kind of miracle; in fact, it's quite close to being broke:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/03/20/health/main681801.shtml
Excerpt:
"Every day we're paying for health care, yet when we go to access it, it's just not there," said Pelton.
The average Canadian family pays about 48 percent of its income in taxes each year, partly to fund the health care system. Rates vary from province to province, but Ontario, the most populous, spends roughly 40 percent of every tax dollar on health care, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
The system is going broke, says the federation, which campaigns for tax reform and private enterprise in health care.