President Obama is busy this week with an international agenda (Middle East, UN General Assembly, and G20 in Pittsburgh). But the linchpin in the current US domestic debate — health care reform — goes on and on and on.

At least the online readers of the Globe and Mail in Canada still rate the president’s chances of health care success high enough. Almost two-thirds of respondents in an online poll are still answering Yes to the question “Will Barack Obama succeed in having a health-care bill passed?”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg.com — a site operated by Bloomberg LP, which is 88% owned by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (also ranked last year as the “eighth-richest American” by Forbes magazine) — is doing its best to add some sanity about Canada to the ongoing US health care debate, with an article called “Canadian Health Care, Even With Queues, Bests US.”

Here are a few fresh items from this source that both Canadians and Americans ought to find interesting:

* According to “research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] and other independent studies published during the past five years … delays do occur for non-emergency procedures” but “Canada’s system of universal health coverage provides care as good as in the US, at a cost 47% less for each person.”

* “Canadians live two to three years longer than Americans and are as likely to survive heart attacks, childhood leukemia, and breast and cervical cancer.”

* “Deaths considered preventable through health care are less frequent in Canada than in the US, according to a January 2008 report in the journal Health Affairs. In the study by British researchers, Canada placed sixth among 19 countries surveyed, with 77 deaths for every 100,000 people. That compared with the last-place finish of the US, with 110 deaths.”

* “The Canadian mortality rate from asthma is one quarter of the US’s, and the infant mortality rate is 34% lower, OECD data show. People in Canada are also 21% more apt to survive five years after a liver transplant.”

Generally, according to Donald Berwick, a Harvard University health-policy specialist and pediatrician who heads the Boston-based nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement: “There is an image of Canadians flooding across the border to get care … That’s just not the case. The public in Canada is far more satisfied with the system than they are in the US and health care is at least as good, with much more contained costs.”

Yet Uwe Reinhardt, a health-care economist at Princeton University, believes that “the Canadian ‘bogeyman’ … may have ‘all but defeated’ the idea of a public option” in the United States — the closest approximation to Canada’s current system (and to the current American publicly funded Medicare and Medicaid programs).

President Obama’s health care crusade is not over yet, of course. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, etc, etc.

And, in any case, the cthonic great spirit of the northern wilderness has its own reasons to be pleased. Whatever else, the lies about Canadian health care in the US debate today do make a lot of Canadians happy that they do not actually live in the United States — as hard as that may be (understandably in some ways, no doubt) for many Americans to believe!