If single-payer health care can protect citizens from suffering a medically induced personal bankruptcy, you wouldn’t know it by comparing the U.S. experience with that of Canada.

According to a recent study by David Himmelstein, Deborah Thorne, Elizabeth Warren, and Steffie Woolhandler, uninsured medical expenses “caused” 62.1 percent of all non-business personal bankruptcies in the United States in 2007. The study authors think this finding—which has been questioned by other researchers—helps make the case for single-payer health care.

But if single-payer is the answer, then why doesn’t Canada have a lower rate of personal bankruptcies than does the United States? As Fraser Institute analysts Brett Skinner and Mark Rovere point out, Canada and the United States had similar rates of personal bankruptcy in 2007: .3 percent for Canada and .27 percent for the United States; and in 2006 Canada had a markedly higher rate (.3 percent) than did the United States (.2 percent).

As Skinner and Rovere point out, Canada and the United States are similar in many respects on health care policy—with the major exception that Canada has single-payer financing and the United States has a mix of public and private financing. It seems, then, that single-payer financing does not make the difference that Himmelstein, et al., think it does.