h/t

Yes, that Fox News.

I've mentioned before that I live in a very red area of a purple state, and you've all seen what some of our denizens can be like. Very knee-jerk, to put it mildly.

But a local radio show host, Rob Williams, on the local Fox channel talks with Jean Holmes about her experience as an average Canadian citizen living with their health care system. His questions cover the typical right-wing talking points, and she answers clearly and simply, debunking those that are lies, but honestly addressing some of the very real problems too.

Some highlights below [very paraphrased, I'm not a good enough typist to transcribe].

There is no contest about what I miss most about Canada. It is universal medical coverage. Just thinking about it, and its absence here, can send me into complete despair.

— David Rakoff

Oh, well! Happy Canada Day!

Snowbirds, ie northerners, many of whom are Canadians, flock to sunny Florida for the winter, because our winters really are better than yours.

Our health care system, however, is not. Canadians generally buy supplemental health insurance so they'll be able to afford American-style health care if they should be so unfortunate as to fall ill while vacationing here.

Just how bad is it here? It's so bad, one Canadian's health insurance company paid $20,000 to ransom him from our system and fly him and his wife home in a Lear jet.

In December, he was wintering in Port Richie, Fla., when he checked into a hospital with stomach cramps and pain.

The Center for American Regress [yeah, i stole that from paul krugman] Progress has basically been the Third Way In Exile, waiting for the return of [the corporate wing of] the Democratic party.

Just one anecdote, and a mild one at that. I know: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". So take it as you will.

My Mom is enrolled via Medicare part C in an HMO whose name will be changed to protect the people working for it who bent the rules a bit. I'll refer to it as MPCHMO. Mom is mostly pretty much happy with MPCHMO. Bear that in mind as you read.

Mom recently found herself suffering from a bewildering array of vague symptoms which were reducing her quality of life dramatically. Age-related? She decided to check it out.

[For anyone visiting Corrente for the first time, the title is ironic and debunks a right wing lie talking point. Read on for why. --lambert]

The socialized medicine will kill you! crowd are going to just love this story if they get their hands on [part of] it.

In a scene that combined tragedy with Monty Python farce, a 77-year-old man in acute respiratory failure turned up at a private medical clinic in Montreal only to be told to wait his turn.

Swift Current. Sounds like a CIA covert operation to me.

Martha Livingston, one of the editors of 10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care, supplements the wonk, describing how Canadian Medicare came about and how it works today.   Read more…

Tommy Douglas, The Greatest Canadian Evah, on how best to finance [Canadian] Medicare. At the time of this speech, 1983, single payer had been in effect in Saskatchewan since the early 1960s, and in all of Canada since the early 1970s.

if you want to contact anyone on the Senate Finance Committee.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others

src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_4Z7itWxmx8A/RcZaxNZu9gI/AAAAAAAAADE/CiHiwpiQVlA/s1600/us-canada_healthcare_comparison.gif" align="left" hspace="6px"/>Hamsters being a prominent theme at the moment, here's a thought you might want to think on [or not] -- for a couple of generations now we've all been guinea pigs in a huge medical experiment. Having [cough] borrowed the graphic from YES! Magazine, I'll go ahead and lift the opening paragrapghs of the accompanying article as well.

Should the United States implement a more inclusive, publicly funded health care system? That's a big debate throughout the country. But even as it rages, most Americans are unaware that the United States is the only country in the developed world that doesn't already have a fundamentally public--that is, tax-supported--health care system.

That means that the United States has been the unwitting control subject in a 30-year, worldwide experiment comparing the merits of private versus public health care funding. For the people living in the United States, the results of this experiment with privately funded health care have been grim. The United States now has the most expensive health care system on earth and, despite remarkable technology, the general health of the U.S. population is lower than in most industrialized countries. Worse, Americans' mortality rates--both general and infant--are shockingly high.