US holding down health care costs better than Canada?

Comments made to this Ezra Klein post:

Seems maybe the Canadians aren't actually so good at controlling health care costs:

"The fact is wait time “strategies” and discussions of public accountability become irrelevant when the public coffers are empty. We can talk about improved efficiency through electronic health records or curbing physician prescribing habits all we want. But provincial governments will continue to face unsustainable growth in health care costs because policy-makers continue to deny the fact that we cannot continue to pay for health care through public means alone. This reality has recently been echoed by numerous organizations, including the Fraser Institute, TD Economics, the C.D. Howe Institute, the OECD and the IMF.

Some more statistics: Over the past 10 years and averaged across the provinces, government health expenditures grew at an annual average rate of 7.5 per cent. Over the same period, total provincial revenues increased at an annual average rate of 5.7 per cent, while the economy grew by 5.2 per cent. Project these growth trends into the future and it’s clear that most provinces will soon be facing a financial crisis. By 2017, six out of 10 provinces are expected to spend 50 per cent of total available revenues on health care. And some provinces are almost already there, such as Ontario and Quebec, where half of provincial revenues will be swallowed up by health care costs by the end of this year."

Full article here: http://www.thespec.com/opinion/columns/article/542450--health-council-of-canada-short-sighted-on-health-care-reform

justin84

Over the past 10 years (1999-2009 actually), U.S. health expenditures grew 6.8 percent per year, while the economy grew 4.2 percent per year.

https://www.cms.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/02_Na...

http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?...

So assuming the data justin84 links to and the source data from that article I posted is correct, the US has actually done better at controlling health care costs than Canada over the last decade?

What about the fact that most of their provinces are/will soon be spending half their total revenue on health care costs? If true this seems pretty extreme and unsustainable.

But isn't cost increase containment the whole point, the thing that's gonna kill us if we don't do it? Canada is an extreme single payer system (doctors can't opt out of it, there can be no competing private system of doctors, hospitals, insurance, etc.) The government IS the health care market and yet with its dominant negotiation power as the only player in town they still are not successfully holding down health care cost increases (i.e. to rate of GDP growth or less). So using Canada as an example of how you can hold costs down effectively by going to single player (as many argue) won't work.