Washington ? It’s the bogeyman of the heated debate about overhauling U.S. health care. Critics charge that revamping the American system will turn the country into Canada, with a nationalized health care system and people dying as they wait for needed services they no longer can get.

New Ipsos/McClatchy online polls find that patients in Canada are indeed much more frustrated by waiting times to see medical specialists than patients in the United States are, and slightly less happy with the waiting times to see their family doctors.

However, they’re much more likely to say that they have access to all the health care services they need at costs they can afford.

That split verdict comes as President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress are proposing several plans to cover the uninsured and to offer a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurance companies.

While Democrats say the government insurance wouldn’t replace private insurance, critics charge that it will lead inevitably to a Canadian-style plan in which the government takes over health insurance.

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., said recently that a government insurance program being considered here “is a slippery slope to a single payer system like Canada or England have, which inevitably leads to putting a bureaucrat between you and your doctor and inevitably leads to delays, it leads to rationing.”

On key questions of care and costs, patients in the two countries clearly see things differently.

Asked about seeing their family doctors, for example, 59 percent of Americans said they could see them quickly when they needed to; 52 percent of Canadians said they could.

The difference in opinions magnified when it came to seeing medical specialists, with 47 percent of Americans saying they can see specialists without long waits. That was nearly twice as high as the 26 percent of Canadians who said they could see specialists without long waits.

Looked at another way, 65 percent of Canadians said they had access to all the health care services they needed at costs they could afford; 49 percent of Americans felt the same way.

That difference probably reflects the costs of health care: Patients pay nothing at doctors’ offices in Canada.

It also helps explain the fact that Americans see health care differently based on their incomes, while Canadians see it roughly the same regardless of what they earn.