With regards to Canada--as I live in a border state I see some of this first hand. I'm close to some major cutting-edge medical establishiments; I live within 2-3 hrs of Beaumont Hospital, UofM Medical Center, and another big hospital in Detroit whose name escapes me now. A fair percentage of the patients in some of them are Canadians, who can afford to pay up front for whatever procedure they are on a waiting list for back in Canada.

And I don't know the whole story about the comics artist, but if he were unemployed and homeless, I'd have thought Medicaid would have picked up the medical cost--I've always understood the truly poor and homeless are the ones served by Medicaid. (Medicare is for senior citizens.) The people in the US who fall through the gaps are the underemployed--fast food workers and the like, who don't make enough money to pay for insurance, but whose job doesn't include it either.