Only Jack Bauer's grandfather can save us now.

I like to torment Canadians, who are wildly supercilious about Americans' ignorance of their northern neighbor. Canada even had a hilarious TV feature, "Talking to Americans," mocking how little we knew about them.

When I meet a Canadian, I ask: Who is Kiefer Sutherland's most famous relative? Inevitably, they say his father, actor Donald Sutherland. To turn the screw, I add: No, this relative was voted the Greatest Canadian, ever, in a 2004 Canadian Broadcasting Corp. poll. Three out of four have no idea whom I am talking about.

Kiefer knows. When asked about the burden of being Donald Sutherland's son, he answers, no, the burden is living up to the legacy of Tommy Douglas, his maternal grandfather. He is a man who changed the world.

Who was Tommy Douglas? He was the social democratic premier of Saskatchewan, an ordained minister partly educated in the social gospel, and partly educated at the University of Chicago, who avoided losing his leg as a young man because a doctor agreed to treat him for free. Douglas pushed through what the Canadians called Medicare - universal, free health insurance - in Saskatchewan, which was later adopted by the national government in 1966.

You think it was easy? Check the clips. The doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike for 23 days, refusing to treat patients. Their arguments were the ones we have been hearing here for decades: Most people already have health insurance, the government has no business regulating the private marketplace, and so on. The doctors lost, and the rest is history. Canada has free medical care. It's not a perfect system - show me one that is - but it must look attractive to the tens of millions of Americans who have no health coverage at all.

Is there a Tommy Douglas for America? President Obama was grooming former Senator Tom Daschle for the role, but that came a cropper. Harvard Business School health policy expert Regina Herzlinger doubts Daschle was up to the job, anyway: "He was defeated for reelection, and he never got any major legislation through." She's doesn't think his two stand-ins at Health and Human Services and inside the White House are world beaters, either: "They are not going to go down in history the way Tommy Douglas did."

"Ted Kennedy might have been able to champion some serious health care reform," Herzlinger adds. "Maybe the Senate will enact all or part of Obama's legislation as a tribute to him."

Is there an appetite for Canadian-style health coverage in the United States? I was told no. "That's a simplistic question," says James Burgess of Boston University's School of Public Health, "but the simple answer is no. In Canada they have a certain number of doctors working off a global budget. Here we have more doctors and more highly paid specialists. To control costs, we're going to have to take away somebody's income, and that will be hard.

"Politically, it's still the case that most people are happy with their coverage in the US," Burgess says. "A small number of people are really harmed by the system, but it's hard to build a populist movement around them."

Even Jon Kingsdale, executive director of our state's modestly socialized Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, thinks it is "very, very, very, very unlikely" that Canadian-style coverage will come to the United States. "It's very popular in Canada, it's cheaper, and it's simple to administer," he says of Canadian Medicare. But "it would be less well received here," Kingsdale thinks. "In other countries, people trust the government to make their lives better, but you don't get that feeling here. The premise is that the government can't be trusted to run the health care system."

Footnote

Netflix

Buy it,it, BitTorrent it, but don't fail to see "Dr. Bethune," the wild 1990 Donald Sutherland-Helen Mirren-Anouk Aimee biopic about Norman Bethune, the hyper-left wing thoracic surgeon and 26th most admired Canadian in the CBC poll. Bethune ministered to the good guys during the Spanish Civil War, and then traveled to China, where he befriended Mao Tse-tung and died while in the service of Mao's Eighth Route Army, which was fighting the Japanese.

Like so much of Sutherland's work, "Bethune" is crazily uneven, occasionally semi-coherent, and definitely worth seeing.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.

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