After a long time away, you see with new eyes.

I moved back to the United States with my Canadian wife and two small boys after living 15 years in Toronto and Ottawa. U.S. health care now looks both expensive and scary, leading me to conclude that we'd do better with an entirely different system.

Nowhere has this been put in sharper relief than in the story of two colleagues. Struck in March with cancer, an American colleague worried about death, insurance loss and bankruptcy. In contrast, a Canadian colleague and cancer victim had only her disease to fight.

Susan was on sick leave when I came to work at my new job in August. She was middle-aged and single with a grown family and well liked in my office. She was undergoing chemotherapy to treat breast cancer and not able to work. Our employer supported her beyond the normal period of sick days and vacation.

But the scary question for anyone but the rich hit with a catastrophic illness in the U.S. health-care system is: How long will an employer's support go on if the battle goes far beyond the time allotted for sickness and vacation? Susan worried about the loss of health-care coverage and what ensues -- second-rate care, bankruptcy, choosing between timely drug therapies and even modest necessities. She died this month before those fears were realized. But had she lived, she and her family would have confronted the excruciating battle survivors have to fight with insurance companies, employers and health-care providers over cost, length and quality of treatment.

In contrast, my former colleague Kathleen back in Canada was gripped by uterine cancer, which had spread to her intestines. While she was locked in a life-and-death battle for 18 months, she didn't have to worry about losing her health care and choosing which bills to pay. Canadian Medicare covers everyone for everything in hospitals and doctors' offices, including some elective procedures. This means no health care-caused bankruptcies. No fights with insurers. No insurance-driven financial worries. Kathleen could save her energy for battling her cancer instead. She did recover, and while her recovery was not necessarily the direct result of differences in care systems, there is no question that she would have suffered more with the burden of financial worries related to her health-care needs.

I hear stories here about Canadians lining up for basic medical care. But despite plenty of doctor appointments, occasionally bringing my children to the ER, and having had a heart procedure myself, I didn't witness any delays for necessary (let alone emergency) care. In survey after survey, Canadians support public, nonprofit health care by a wide margin.

And why not? Compared to the United States, Canada has much lower infant-mortality rates and a longer life expectancy, according to data from the World Health Organization. Canadian women get just as many mammograms, for example, as do American women. This is achieved despite spending far less per person on health care -- 10 percent of per capita GDP in Canada goes to health care versus 15-plus percent in the United States, according to WHO research.

After 40 years of private health care in America and 15 years of Canada's Medicare, I'll take the latter. But of course, I can't; it's not available here. I love my country but not the private health-care system that abandons many people and worries even more.

Few Americans know that every other industrial country in the world has a health-care system more or less like Canada's. I think even fewer realize that we do, too -- it's called (U.S.) Medicare. The system that boosted the health of Americans 65 and older is similar to Canada's system for everyone. They're both "public, not-for-profit, single-payer" systems with low overhead costs. So why not extend Medicare to every American?

Our seniors like it. Sure, it will raise the cost of this government program by billions of dollars, according to even the most conservative estimates. But it will save money for both individuals and employers who now purchase private health insurance. After all, it's not how much of your income you pay, it's how much you keep. You'll keep more under Medicare-for-all, and every child, woman and man would get the timely health care they need.

Give people the opportunity to face and fight their illnesses, not their insurance companies.

Tom O'Brien joined the California Nurses Association (www.calnurse.org) upon moving back to the United States in August.

© San Francisco Chronicle

###