ATLANTA -- You can add Canadians to the list of foreigners who are healthier than Americans.

Americans are 42 percent more likely than Canadians to have diabetes, 32 percent more likely to have high blood pressure and 12 percent more likely to have arthritis, according to Harvard Medical School researchers.

The study comes less than a month after other researchers reported that middle-aged, white Americans are much sicker than their counterparts in England.

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a co-author of the Canadian study, said that Canada's national health insurance program is at least part of the reason for the differences found in the study.
 
In the Canadian study, insured Americans and Canadians had about the same rates of disease. It was the uninsured Americans who made the overall U.S. figures worse.

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