Mothers in British Columbia are having a baby boom, but it's the United States that has to deliver, and that has some proud Canadians blasting their highly touted government healthcare system.

"I'm a born-bred Canadian, as well as my daughter and son, and I'm ashamed," Jill Irvine told FOX News. Irvine's daughter, Carri Ash, is one of at least 40 mothers or their babies who've been airlifted from British Columbia to the U.S. this year because Canadian hospitals didn't have room for the preemies in their neonatal units.

"It's a big number and bigger than the previous capacity of the system to deal with it," said Adrian Dix, a British Columbia legislator, told FOXNews.com. "So when that happens, you can't have a waiting list for a mother having the baby. She just has the baby."

• Click here to watch a video report of this story

The mothers have been flown to hospitals in Seattle, Everett, Wash., and Spokane, Wash., to receive treatment, as well as hospitals in the neighboring province of Alberta, Dix said. Three mothers were airlifted in the first weekend of October alone, including Carri Ash.

"I just want to go home and see my kids," she said from her Seattle hospital bed. "I think it's stupid I have to be here."

Canada's socialized health care system, hailed as a model by Michael Moore in his documentary, "Sicko," is hurting, government officials admit, citing not enough money for more equipment and staff to handle high risk births.

Sarah Plank, a spokeswoman for the British Columbia Ministry of Health, said a spike in high risk and premature births coupled with the lack of trained nurses prompted the surge in mothers heading across the border for better care.

"The number of transfers in previous years has been quite low," Plank told FOXNews.com. "Before this recent spike we went for more than a year with no transfers to the U.S., so this is something that is happening in other provinces as well."

Critics say these border crossings highlight the dangers of a government-run health care system.

"The Canadian healthcare system has used the United States as a safety net for years," said Michael Turner of the Cato Institute. "In fact, overall about one out of every seven Canadian physicians sends someone to the United States every year for treatment."

Neonatal intensive care units in Alberta and Ontario have also been stretched to capacity, she said.

The cost of these airlifts and treatments, paid to U.S. hospitals by the province under Canada's universal health care system, runs upwards of $1,000 a child.

"We clearly want to see more capacity built in the Canadian system because it’s also expensive for taxpayers here to send people out of the country," Dix said.

The surge could be due to women giving birth later in life, and passport restrictions and family separation adds to the stress.

"I think it’s reasonable to think that this is a trend that would continue and we have to prepare for it and increase the number of beds to deal with perhaps the new reality of the number of premature babies and newborns needing a higher level of care in Canada," Dix said.

British Columbia has added more neonatal beds and increased funding for specialized nurse training, Plank said.

"There is an identified need for some additional capacity just due to population growth and that sort of thing and that is actively being implemented," she said.

FOX News' Dan Springer contributed to this report.

Not sure we can blame Hillary for that one-

The 'new' Hillary care is interesting: private insurance for everyone.. required. If you can't afford it, one will be assigned to you. She's trying to bridge the for-profit insurance companies and our no-one-denies better hospitals.

My issue with this is that insurance companies are the culprit- they make money on every transaction- and get more for denying care.

If we pass socialized medicine into law here, I guess the Canadians will have to start flying to other countries to buy care.

The 'new' Hillary care is interesting: private insurance for everyone.
Hmmm...kind of like when her husband promised everyone free college education during his 2nd presidential campaign? A lot of people conveniently forget that one, along with a lot of other things. Bottom line, there's no easy answer to our healthcare woes. Greater government control is certainly not the answer, especially since their manipulation has in large part brought us to the mess we're in. No country with a national debt in the trillions (balanced budget or not) and uncontrolled litigation should even consider socialized medicine. Staying the course is equally unacceptable. If you let Hillary, Edwards, or anyone with a similar scam actually get their way at your expense, the situation will get worse if you give it enough time. Healthcare is a significant part of our GNP. I can't believe people actually want to hand that over to direct governmental control. Why don't we hand over the US auto industry too, given the problems they're having. The British finally figured that out awhile ago. The British car industry became better and more competitive only when the government finally handed it over to the private sector. They're also slowly moving in that direction for healthcare too, although the mainstream media will never tell you that.

Our healthcare problem will take a long time to fix, and it will require a steadfast multipronged approach. It's not going to be easy or painless, at least at the beginning. The healthcare industry has to be made more competitive in a way that helps individual people. That's not going to happen with the huge monopolies that Medicare (i.e., the federal government) and other huge medical insurance corporations (e.g., Blue Cross) essentially represent. The government has to cease the arbitrary price fixing that it has long imposed through CMS (Medicare Fee Schedule). Doctors and hospitals around the country have been steadily closing shop because of these pitiful, unbalanced, non-market-driven reimbursements. They also have been moving toward "boutique" services or get bought out by larger hospital alliances that provide more limited services or lower-cost, lower quality service than before (or just shuts down the hospital to wipe out local competition). People somehow have to be able to see a doctor or receive service at a hospital on a direct, out-of-pocket, fee for service basis. When the whole "pie" gets broken up into a myriad of individuals who are allowed to choose their own physicians and hospitals, the competitive market forces those physicians and hospitals to work harder to provide higher-quality and broader range of services at a lower cost. Looks at the electronics industry. Its highly competitive, free market nature drives innovation (almost to a sci-fi level) and provides us a broad range of incredibly inexpensive electronic applicances. When we as a people pay for something out of pocket, we rightfully demand more for our dollar, and (the key) are more willing to be accountable and responsible for what we get. When we buy a car, most of us are quite diligent in taking care of the car, driving more carefully to avoid accidents, etc. If the government just gave each of us a car, I can guarantee you that we're more likely to receive something we don't really like and will not likely take care of it as well. On the other side, receiving cold hard cash compels the provider (physician or hospital) to provide more bang for the buck. If the providers don't strive to be better, then people go elsewhere and the physician, clinic or hospital either changes for the better or goes out of business. The trick to all of this is to drive down costs for patients, physicians and hospitals. We've already seen what happens when the government does this: Fewer available top-quality doctors and hospitals. If you don't believe this, ask any Medicaid patient how easy it is to find a good private-practice physician or look at the VA Medical Centers at large and ask how "happy" their patients are with the quality of physicians and care. To reduce costs, a variety of things needs to be done. We've already talked about the critical piece: A free market. But other critical components are to control litigation and reduce the enormous number of unfunded mandates that federal and state governments put on physicians and hospitals (which the average patient never hears about). One of the most egregious examples is HPPA, Bill Clinton's (along with the Republican Congress at the time) last kick in the groin to the US healthcare industry before he left office. Despite the millions of dollars spent by physicians and hospitals to comply with all of those governmental mandates (that sound great on paper), not one bit of it has substantively improved the day-to-day medical care of individual people. And it only starts there. The medical-legal problem drives up the cost of medical care significantly. Not only are physicians and hospitals forced to order tests they normally wouldn't have to do, a host of non-medical risk management staff need to be hired to deal with these issues, not to mentional additional legal counsel, administrative costs, etc. This money doesn't come out of a vacuum. It all has to come from the reimbursements provided from taking care of patients, and the situation is only getting worse. What's so sickenly laughable is that the 2 people (Hillary Clinton and John Edwards) who are touted to have the solution to our healthcare problems are both lawyers, one of whom is an infamous medical malpractice lawyer. Talk about having the fox guarding the henhouse! I can't stand the Democrats or a lot of Republicans at this point, but I can guarantee you that the Democrats are the least likely to reform the malpractice problem, or any tort reform for that matter. There's so much more that is involved, and I've only mentioned a few of the highlights. I told myself not to get involved in this, but when I see some of the ridiculous comments made on this board and Spearboard by people who don't know what in the hell they're talking about, it gets really frustrating. I've been taking care of people for more than a decade in a variety of different clinical settings, but I still believe in what I do. You won't believe how bad things really are behind-the-scenes. Seeing what the government has done to steadily destroy what used to be the best medical training and care in the world has been disheartening. To see other Americans and the media praise the government for the "good" it claims to have done in medical care is both heart-breaking and demoralizing.