Kathryn, one of the funniest (in a mordant — ie, death-panel — kinda way) glimpses of socialized health care is Denys Arcand’s Oscar-winner from a couple of years back, Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions Barbares). If you’re looking for popcorn and a movie to go with your Harry Reid this weekend, you’ll love the opening: An old socialist professor (il s’appelle Remy, but in the course of the movie no doctor ever calls him the right name) is being “treated” for cancer in a Montreal hospital, and the camera weaves its way to his bed through an endless maze of corridors clogged with patients lying on gurneys hooked up to tubes snaking their way back down the hallways to wherever the overflow started. It looks like a Victorian workhouse in the middle of a war zone, but it’s not: It’s business as usual.

Remy’s son contacts an old friend, now a doctor. Like many (most?) Québécois doctors, he’s now working in America, at a hospital in Baltimore that could help with the diagnosis if the chaps in Montreal were able to e-mail them a scan. No can do. The only machine in the province that can perform the scan is 90 minutes away in Sherbrooke and there’s a six-to-twelve month waiting list, by which time they’ll have to dig Remy up to do it. That’s the wait time for the scan, not the diagnosis, never mind the treatment.

His son decides to get it done down south, and the moment when the ailing socialist glimpses the Vermont border post and croaks in an ironic accent “God bless America” is like something out of a medical version of The Great Escape.

Full disclosure: One of my dearest friends, as we say in showbusiness, is in the movie. But M. Arcand is a Québécois leftie of impeccable credentials, and the movie even has a cheap Bush joke, so your liberal pals won’t be able to dismiss it as redneck scaremongering. (The film is a sequel to Le déclin de l’empire américain, another title that seems oddly apt this particular weekend.)

For non-Oscar-winning entertainment from Canadian health care, go here and click on the “Two Women” video.