Didn't the UK suddenly hike tuition?
What you've heard about is that the "fees" for home students were raised. What this actually means is that more of home students' costs will be met from them (via a central loans system) and less from central taxation. Overseas students, who were paying unsubsidised fees anyway, are not directly affected, although I see that Cambridge did restructure fees for them too and the result is an above-inflation rise especially for engineering; details at that link. Of course there are no guarantees about the future, but UK universities currently do not really have the "arms race" of needing stellar non-academic facilities that someone posted an article about recently. For Cambridge next year, we're talking 16-23 thousand pounds per year, depending on course. I'm not saying this is definitely a good deal, just that it's worth considering!
The UK has a strange system where you can go from high school right into medical school, though Canada and the US don't accept the degree as equivalent, you have to do medical school here also.
Certainly anything involving a professional qualification needs particularly careful scrutiny, yes. It's not quite as strange as you might think, but it is differently organised - UK medical training is split into "pre-clinical" and "clinical". While you might think of entering the 3yr pre-clinical stage as "going right into medical school", that part has a lot of basic science in it like what US students might do before their medical degree, and you aren't a doctor until you've done clinical also, so it ends up being not as different as might at first appear. I don't think it's that you have do do medical school in both places, although if you did your pre-clinical only here and then went back to the US I'm sure you would then need to go to med school there. Both systems are quite rightly concerned not to allow under-trained medics to practise... However, this is so specific as to be off-topic so I'll stop :-)
