Tommy Douglas & Mouseland

The clip is Prairie Giant: Tommy Douglas.

Here's the allegory, which he told for audiences from the 1940s to the 1960s. We need to begin sharing it too:
Mouseland

Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do.

They even had a Parliament. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats.

Now if you think it strange that mice should elect a government made up of cats, you just look at the history of Canada for last 90 years and maybe you'll see that they weren't any stupider than we are.

Now I'm not saying anything against the cats. They were nice fellows. They conducted their government with dignity. They passed good laws--that is, laws that were good for cats. But the laws that were good for cats weren't very good for mice. One of the laws said that mouse holes had to be big enough so a cat could get his paw in. Another law said that mice could only travel at certain speeds--so that a cat could get his breakfast without too much effort.

All the laws were good laws. For cats. But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn't put up with it any more, they decided something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats.

Now the white cats had put up a terrific campaign. They said: "All that Mouseland needs is more vision." They said:"The trouble with Mouseland is those round mouse holes we got. If you put us in we'll establish square mouse holes." And they did. And the square mouseholes were twice as big as the round mouse holes, and now the cat could get both his paws in. And life was tougher than ever. And when they couldn't take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black ones in again. Then they went back to the white cats. Then to the black cats. They even tried half black cats and half white cats. And they called that coalition. They even got one government made up of cats with spots on them: they were cats that tried to make a noise like a mouse but ate like a cat.

You see, my friends, the trouble wasn't with the color of the cat. The trouble was that they were cats. And because they were cats, they naturally looked after cats instead of mice.

Presently there came along one little mouse who had an idea. My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea. And he said to the other mice, "Look fellows, why do we keep on electing a government made up of cats? Why don't we elect a government made up of mice?" "Oh," they said, "he's a Bolshevik. Lock him up!"

So they put him in jail.

But I want to remind you: that you can lock up a mouse or a man but you can't lock up an idea.

You can hear hear Tommy Douglas himself tell the story from this 1961 clip at the CBC Archives. It's a story that needs to be told again, and again, and again. In 1944, 1961, 1982, 2000 and today. Because, sadly enough, most mice go through an astonishing transformation when they get rich and powerful. They become cats.

Edwards OK with single-payer

You'll like the article in the NYT on Edwards:

PATRICK, S.C. — Former Senator John Edwards does not discount the possibility that his health care proposal, which would allow Americans to buy new government insurance packages modeled on Medicare, could evolve into a federalized system like those in Canada and many European countries. And if it does, Mr. Edwards said he would be just fine with that.

But Mr. Edwards, of North Carolina, emphasized in a 40-minute interview on health policy that the choice would be made not in Washington, but by consumers in an open marketplace where private insurance competes with government plans.

Republican candidates and policy strategists have raised the specter of “socialized medicine” and depicted the Democratic plans as a back-door route to a so-called single-payer government system.

Mr. Edwards brushed off that critique. “There is nothing back-door about it,” he said. “It’s right through the front door. We’re going to let America decide what health care system works for them.”

Canada's "failed" system

The issue of Canada's "failed" system is a bit like the lawyer's question, "When did you stop beating your wife?"

If you bring up data that shows that Canada's system is actually in better shape than ours -- at about half the cost -- it implies that you are advocating for a Canada-like system, when in fact single-insurer supporters in the United States believe that we could actually do far better than Canada.

But you have to reply. It's a given in too many Americans' heads that Canada's is a failed system -- just like it's a given that Barack Obama is a "dangerous Muslim." They heard it on that great pipeline of lies, talk radio.

Anyway, here's a listener writing the Fort Collins paper, the Coloradoan:

Colorado is moving toward a single-payer health-care system that it is going to model after the one in Canada... If we do allow these people in Denver to emulate this failed system, we must at least be certain that they do not take away our right to also have access to private insurance and hospitalization at our own cost to make sure that what is happening to so many in Canada will not befall us here as well."

Although he's wrong about Canada, I have to hope he's right about our moving towards single-payer. It's fear-based prediction on his part, pure hope on mine.

There was a longer piece along these same lines yesterday in the Sea Coast Online, from the author of "Doggone Right."

He was writing to counter opinion pieces written by two physicians and a nurse, all calling for single-payer. He dismissed them, saying that their medical degrees weren't degrees in economics. He writes that he and his wife understand "recognize that I am alive and kicking because of the quality of care we purchase."

This is at the root of a lot of the Right's opposition to universal health care. They don't just have the anti-government ideology, although that's part of it. They want people to suffer if they don't work hard enough. They want the system to reward the good and punish, really punish, people who don't measure up. The fact that the system is stacked against a lot of folks doesn't matter for many, and for the rest, it's just a matter of tweaking, and private charity should take care of it.

This Portsmouth guy rails a bit against "free" health care -- which, of course, is a straw man. One of the MDs wrote about the Massachusetts plan: ""Seventy-nine percent of these newly insured individuals are very poor people enrolled in Medicaid or similar free plans. Virtually all of them were previously eligible for completely free care funded by the state, but face co-payments under the new plan."

The point of this is that Massachusetts has held up as a point of success the numbers of people who have signed on to insurance since the mandate went into effect. In fact, the people who have signed on are not people who would have to pay much, if anything, out of their own pockets. The problem Massachusetts has run into are lower wage families who would have to buy out of their own pockets one of the crappy plans offered to them.

In what is almost surely a deliberate distortion, the Portsmouth guy says that because the physicians called this care "free" they don't know what they're talking about. "There is no such animal as free health care. You and I pay every penny, through taxes and our own insurance premiums."

The guy's a regular Sherlock Holmes. Glad he cleared that up for us.

101,000 excess deaths in U.S.

A recent study published in Health Affairs show that there aren't just 18,000 deaths a year because of our idiotic system, there are actually 101,000 excess deaths annually. France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst. The study focused on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 industrialized nations. The U.S. health care system's shortcomings resulted in 101,000 more deaths than if we'd had a system based on care rather than profit.

Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they did.

They called such deaths an important way to gauge the performance of a country's health care system.

Nolte said the large number of Americans who lack any type of health insurance -- about 47 million people in a country of about 300 million, according to U.S. government estimates -- probably was a key factor in the poor showing of the United States compared to other industrialized nations in the study.

"I wouldn't say it (the last-place ranking) is a condemnation, because I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access. But if you don't, I think that's the main problem, isn't it?" Nolte said in a telephone interview.

Spain was fourth best, followed in order by Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland and Portugal. The United States comes in last.

Good comment on this at Cronespeaks:

As a Canadian, I do not want to see the USA get universal health care or free universal education. Much of Canada’s increasing economic advantage comes from the malaise and stupidity of directly competing demographic areas in the USA; and we are winning because of our healthcare and educational advantages.

Recently, Toyota chose Ontario Canada over Alabama as a site for their largest manufacturing site. Why?

Toyota cited a much more highly educated workforce and the savings in healthcare costs as the deciding factors in choosing Canada. Please keep your present system in the USA — it’s “Merkan, so it’s gotta be the ‘best’!

It could be that Stuart Butler, Canada's anti-Michael Moore "brilliant" filmmaker, Stuart Browning might sign her on to help him... You think he'd go for that?

Bravo, Ootpoot!

Maine paper pushes single-payer

This isn't quite an endorsement of single-payer, but it's pretty close. The Bangor Daily News evidently has a readership close enough to Canada that they're not fooled by the propaganda slurring Canada's system. The editorial reads:

Much of American health care is already run quite satisfactorily on a single payer basis: Medicare, Medicaid and the veterans’ health system.

Government run health plans, usually single payer plans, are good enough for Canada, Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and most other developed countries. Why can’t they even be considered and debated by candidates for the U.S. presidency?

Don't let them choose

Mort Kondracke, executive editor of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, offers up conventional beltway wisdom on healthcare reform in a piece decrying the idea that people should be able to choose a public plan.

The case against Clinton's health plan -- and it's applicable to Edwards and Obama as well -- is that by creating a Medicare-like government alternative to private insurance and heavily regulating private plans, people will flood to the government plan, leading to Canadian-style medicine.

As Joseph Antos, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute put it, Clinton has designed "a reasonably clever way to prove that the private sector doesn't work and have the government swoop in on a white horse. ... [She's] not jumping immediately to a single-payer system -- politically, that's a smart move -- [but] indirectly."

Antos and others contend that Clinton's proposed requirements that insurance companies cover everyone who wants a policy ("guaranteed issue") and charge everyone the same premium regardless of health, age or pre-existing medical conditions ("community rating") will hugely raise the price of private insurance, giving an advantage to her government-run insurance plan.

At a forum last week sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Clinton said, "We're going to change the way insurance companies do business in America. Right now, [they] spend $50 billion a year trying to figure out how not to cover people. Well, I'm going to save them a fortune and a whole lot of time because the new policy is, no more discrimination, period."

Clinton's $50 billion figure seems to encompass all underwriting, marketing and administrative costs for the insurance industry. She said government programs were far more efficient, but neglected to note that insurance companies provide services like disease management that public plans don't.

Various studies show that several states that have imposed guaranteed-issue and community rating requirements in the past ultimately repealed them after insurance companies dropped coverage and quit selling in the states.

Other studies document that public satisfaction with Canada's single-payer system is low because of long waits for diagnostic tests and surgery. Canada's Supreme Court overruled the government's ban on private insurance.

Kondracke's got a couple things wrong. First of all, Canadians are more satisfied than Americans on their healthcare, and only 8 percent say they'd prefer to switch to the U.S. system.

Second of all, disease management? Disease management is something our private insurance system does well? What?

According to Wikipedia, disease management concerns itself with coronary heart disease, kidney failure, hypertension, heart Failure, obesity, diabetes, asthma, cancer, arthritis, depression, and other common ailments. Exactly the kinds of chronic conditions that American health plans cherry pick against.

Most if not all of these ailments are managed far better in Canada and other universal healthcare nations. Far too often an HMO's management consists of making insurance coverage unaffordable and then, once a person drops coverage, no other insurance plan being willing to take that person on. And in any case, disease management would of course be part of public plans — even today. Because they're a function of the providers. Whether it's the VA or a physician getting paid through Medicare — or even an HMO being paid through Medicare — providers either do a good job or not of disease management. Because there's continuity of care in, for instance, France, disease management is done better than we can manage.

I'm not a regular reader of Roll Call. Who knew it was funded by lobbyists? Makes sense, though. Someone's got to pay the bills.

The Lasik surgery myth

The guy in the audience stood to declare that Lasik surgery shows that if the free market were just allowed to work, it would work in healthcare just like it does everywhere else. Lasik's costs just keep going down.

This is a cherished myth on the right. Because a one-time, walk-in surgery's costs have dropped, they'd like to believe that little Thomas Wilkes' $4,000-a-day factor for hemophilia would also drop. Eventually.

Suppose it did — suppose it dropped 20 percent a year, like Lasik surgery has. By 2009, perhaps Thomas' daily costs for that medication would just be $3,000 a day. Perhaps the Wilkes could afford that. Of course, that medication is just one part of their costs — all together Thomas' treatment costs about $1 million a year.

The fact is that the cost of catastrophic illness and injury under free market conditions would be beyond reach for most of us. We'd just have to hope we didn't get sick or hurt and know that we'd die if we got cancer or were hit by a bus — leaving our children orphaned.

We can't afford to be on our own when it comes to healthcare. We have to pool the risk, and be smart about funding preventive care.

I attended the Northern Colorado Business Journal's Health Care Summit today, mostly to hear "The Great Single-Payer Debate" between Dr. Cory Carroll, a single-payer universal healthcare advocate, and Republican State Senator Shawn Mitchell.

That debate was originally to have been between a Blue Ribbon Commissioner and Dr. Carroll. Weren't the commissioners supposed to keep an open mind about possible solutions?

There were also "healthcare heroes" awards, one of which went to Dr. Glenn Pearson, who was given the award for his work supporting Physicians for a National Health Plan. It is so refreshing that a business journal would recognize Dr. Pearson's work like that. I hope they're not penalized by insurance companies pulling advertising. It was a brave move.

Dr. Carroll, a Health Care for All Colorado supporter, gave a great presentation on why business should support single-payer universal healthcare.

He made the point that as long as there's the 1986 EMTALA law — that's the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act — which requires hospitals to care for people in dire need of treatment, that the "free market" really can't work in healthcare. Hospitals would have to be able to turn away victims of car accidents, if they could not pay. Now while that may fit in with the Independence Institute's libertarian values, it's certainly not "What would Jesus do?"

"For a true free market system to succeed, those who cannot pay do not get care," Dr. Carroll said.

This is something those against single-payer universal healthcare play both ways. On the one hand, they complain that government intervention has distorted the market, and that's why it doesn't work. On the other hand, they say that we don't need single-payer, we just need to strengthen the safety net. But not government, I guess. Although anyone from the hospital associations or from charitable organizations will tell you that there's no way that charities can afford to replace the government safety net. Single-payer universal healthcare could, however.

Dr. Carroll included a David Letterman-style top ten reasons why business should support single-payer universal health care. I missed #2, but here are the rest of his reasons:

10. The single-payer system will reduce liability insurance and workers compensation costs for businesses.
9. Single-payer will eliminate the costs and headaches of running a health benefits program — no more annual negotiations with insurance companies.
8. Single-payer will eliminate complaints from employees about the company's health plan.
7. Single-payer will reduce incentives to hire part-time workers.
6. Single-payer will curb medical bankruptcies and free up money for spending on consumer items.
5. Single-payer will reduce the overall costs of covering employees.
4. Single-payer will eliminate retiree benefit costs.
3. Single-payer will reduce absenteeism because the workforce will be healthier.
2. Dunno.
1. Single-payer will allow health care costs to be controlled and predictable, eliminating a major source of business uncertainty and a barrier to planning.

Dr. Carroll also gave the audience a brief history lesson on universal healthcare, with dates that other countries adopted universal health care — the 1800s for Germany — and failed attempts in the U.S.: 1935 for FDR; 1948 for Truman; and 1994 for Clinton.

Sen. Mitchell was smart and funny. He offered the standard criticisms of single-payer universal healthcare — that the U.S. does best for breast cancer and that you might have to wait for a hip replacement in Canada — and managed to make it sound as though the U.S. system was always best and other countries' systems wracked with problems. His foundation seemed to be that yes, primary care was good in those countries, and you were probably happy with your care as long as you didn't need a specialist, but once you needed a specialist you'd be best off flying to the U.S. for care. Which isn't true at all.

All the same, he was personable and funny — and seemed open to learning more about single-payer. He seemed to think that those other countries were moving towards the U.S.'s system, which has no bearing in reality. The Canadian Supreme Court saying that auxiliary health insurance should be legal does not in any way equate to those countries moving more towards our system. People in the rest of the industrialized world mostly assume that Americans have universal healthcare too. Doesn't everyone? Those people who do know — and more will soon, because "SiCKO" will be a hit internationally — feel sorry for us.

Conservatives everywhere are in favor of cost-effective universal healthcare, which means single-payer universal healthcare or a slight modification of it. The U.S. right is the exception that proves the rule on this. What's more, the best of them, if they only had the facts in hand, would surely join their Tory brethren.

More MRIs? Who's paying?

Dr. John Daley in New Hampshire writes a rebuttal to an anti-single-payer editorial:

In New Hampshire, approximately 135,000 citizens lack health insurance, and for those who have it many can't get all they need. The MRI wait may not be long, but many people can't see their doctor, much less get an MRI. Now with health savings accounts and high deductible plans I have insured patients refusing their MRIs due to the cost.

Where's the profit motive?

One of the best parts of working for a Catholic paper, which I did for about 16 years, was hearing stories of people doing good. The profit motive was rarely involved.

OK. Never.


I remember marveling about the farmers who would give so much time and treasure to build churches — and hospitals, as in this corny Canadian promo for universal healthcare being part of their traditional values — their heritage.

In any case, I'd look at how magnificent Mount Angel's church was, for instance, and I could see that although communities working together was also part of our heritage, we, their descendants, weren't likely to give so much.

Why?

Could the conservatives be right? Has there been a disintegration of values? What did happen to our community values? Our "We're in this together," golden rule values?

Now here's another question. Could it be that the Right is actually more to blame than the Left for this? Did they get so scared of communism that they tossed the baby right out with the bathwater?

Canadian system works

Brilliant at Breakfast ran a link to the NYT story below with a nice commentary. BaB writes:

Health care is not something that can be left to "market forces", because such market forces leave people with illnesses or chronic conditions out in the cold. It's impossible to comparison-shop for coverage when your choice is among premiums that are Exorbitant, Preposterous, and You've Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me -- and that's assuming you can find coverage.

Brilliant at Breakfast, by the way, is a great blog name, isn't it? The site begins with a quote from Oscar Wilde: "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."

Ha. Indeed.

There is this wonderful comment there, from AnoCan:

I'm a Canadian. Despite what you might hear in the US, the health care system here has never let me down, nor let down anyone I know.

Sometimes you have to wait -- and if you go to the emergency room for a sniffle you will surely wait -- but I've been seriously ill a few times and been treated promptly and professionally. And I have never paid a dime for it. And when I go to a neighbourhood clinic for my sniffle I wait 10-20 minutes and am seen by a friendly professional who treats me. If I need a specialist I am referred. Everything works as it should and I don't pay a dime for any of it.

File the boogeyman stories you hear about Canadian medical care in the same file as the "Global War on Terror": manufactured facts to sell an agenda that does not benefit you.

Canada, U.S. waits

So again, what is it with the Canadians and knee surgery?

Their knee surgery rates are up 20 percent in 2005-2006 from the previous year.

Here in the United States, single-payer activists hear about Canadians’ waits for knee surgery almost on a daily basis. To hear “socialized medicine” critics, there are entire provinces of crippled Canadians who have been on waiting lists for decades.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand that while knee and hip surgeries aren’t life-savers, they are quality-of-life-savers.

My grandmother, who lived alone in the house she’d raised her children in, fell off her back porch on New Years Eve in the late 1980s. She came to with her foot next to her head. Being one tough old lady, she dragged herself up the stairs, back into the house, through her kitchen and to the phone in the livingroom. She was never the same afterwards — something that doctors say is often the case for seniors after breaking a hip.

After the actually-elected President Bush had his hip surgery a while back, CNN quoted a doctor saying, “Some patients can't walk from a chair to a bed, but with surgery we can make them almost normal and take away their pain."

So I’m glad the Canadian prime minister and provincial premiers targeted hip and knee surgery as being two of the country’s five “priority” surgeries — reducing waiting times by increasing surgeries.

But I’m also thankful because those waits gave ammunition to the enemies of equitable healthcare — leaving people like me sputtering that no system can possibly be perfect, considering that humans are in charge, but that Canada is doing a lot better than we are.

CNN noted that the cost of a hip replacement was $25,000 in the U.S. in 2000:

A major study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1996 found the operation was cost effective. It found the average lifetime savings of a hip replacement is $117,000. The difference is largely due to savings in nursing care.

“Unless, of course,” muses the health insurance CEO, “you simply eliminate the nursing care...”

That increase in surgeries in Canada was part of a $41 billion agreement between the provinces and the national government that brought wait times down by 20 percent in Ontario, according to a Globe and Mail story.

Some Canadians are traveling abroad for surgery. Bob McDonnell, a high-school teacher, decided to have his surgery done in “the popular medical tourist destination” of Chennai, India.

He paid $7,000, plus $4,000 travel expenses.

The Ontario government reimbursed McDonnell for his surgery, but not for his transportation and lodging. Seems like he should have been reimbursed for that as well, considering he’d been quoted a two and a half year wait:

However, waiting times vary widely, with the queue at St. Joseph's Health Care, London, being the shortest in the province, with 90 per cent of patients obtaining their hip-replacement surgery in 41 days. Compare that to Lakeridge Health Corporation in Oshawa, where Mr. McDonnell was queued: 90 per cent of patients had their surgery done in 370 days, during the same period.

SadButTrue over at Friendly Neighbour and Les Enragés notes that it would be interesting to compare the out of pocket costs for patients on either side of the border who both had hip replacements.

I can’t find the average cost for a hip surgery for an American citizen, but the biggest medical tourism company, MedRetreat, is U.S.-based. Don’t think those Indian surgeons only operate on Canadians.

MedRetreat sends customers to Brazil, India, South Africa, Thailand, Malaysia, and Agentina. They say:

Incredible Savings Why do people travel abroad to undergo medical procedures? The answer is simple...Affordable healthcare. Not to mention a little peaceful relaxation in complete anonymity.

Christian Science Monitor quotes Alain Enthoven, senior fellow at the Center for Health Policy in Stanford, Calif., saying that "Global healthcare is coming and American healthcare, which is pricing itself out of reach, needs to know there are alternatives…"

For critics, Americans heading overseas for care shows the severity of the country's healthcare crisis - especially as employers' health insurance premiums have risen 73 percent while average employee contributions have risen 143 percent since 2000, according to the NCHC [the National Coalition on Health Care]. Rising costs stem from poor management, inefficiences, waste, fraud, and lack of competition, critics say.

"We're seeing some employers who are seriously beginning to think about doing [global healthcare] and not giving employees an option," says Joel Miller, vice president of operations at the NCHC. "And that has implications for quality of care, and what recourse people have if something goes wrong overseas."

Hospital officials say only a sliver of business will be lost to overseas providers. Yet going overseas for expensive medical services, such as heart bypass surgery, cut into US hospitals profit centers - such as heart units - that are used to underwrite emergency rooms and indigent care.

"[Global healthcare] will limit the amount of money that's available for everybody else to have access to the system and starts to jeopardize access to healthcare for everybody in the community," says Don Dalton, a spokesman for the North Carolina Hospital Association.

The Americans who won't know about this, as always are the politicians, many of whom — ex-presidents and Indiana lawmakers, for instance — enjoy gold-plated coverage for life. Now if it's good enough for public servants, wouldn't it be good enough for us too?

We're People, Not Statistics

Josef Stalin said that half million people dead in Ukraine was a statistic. But the death of one girl — now that was a tragedy.

Stalin was right. As humans, that's how we think. We can't get our minds around, for instance, 18,000 deaths a year linked to a lack of health insurance in the United States. But we can understand the tragedy of one death, like that of my brother, Paul Hannum.

Paul's friend Pete Holland wrote this song and sang it at Paul's Los Angeles memorial service:

someone's having fun and it seems at our expense
you wish a joke so stupid must make some kind of sense
but it's so funny we can smile
we just sit there for a while
there's no reason, no one knows
i don't get it, are you sure that's how it goes?



the things you don't need, you can always hold and touch
and the ones that disappear are the ones that mean so much
and its so funny we're in tears
and will be for years and years
no lesson learned, no wisdom gained
it's so funny that we're in pain

though every story is a treasure, and every memory gold
we'd trade them all away to watch our friend grow old
so he could laugh once again at the absurdity of life
and be a father and a husband to his daughter and his wife
and it's so funny we can't smile
we sit in silence for a while
the only words that remain
are I don't get it, can someone please explain?



Paul's baby girl was born this October.

The way I am choosing to bring some meaning to Paul's death is to throw myself into the effort to change our country's so-called healthcare system.

This blog, begun on Christmas day — our first without Paul — is part of that.

Welcome to those visitors who have linked here from Crooks & Liars, one of best sites on the web.

In fact, Paul loved C&L too. He'd be glad to know that he continues to be connected with its readers.

A big thanks to SadButTrue over at Les Enragés for editing my guest blog there. Paul's story and that of SadButTrue's best friend in Canada are mirror images of one another; Paul being on the dark side of the mirror, SadButTrue's friend on the bright side. Still alive, still loving, still laughing with his family and friends. Still outraged too.

The Canadian healthcare system was what made the difference. SadButTrue wrote that his friend's first medical crisis was the spontaneous collapse of one of his lungs. "His wife decided not to wait for an ambulance, just bundled him into the car and broke every traffic law getting him to the emergency ward as fast as possible. Which, the doctors told her, saved his life. After reinflating his lung, the docs decided he should stay in the hospital for further observation. The next day his other lung collapsed. The doctors said that, had he not already been in the hospital, this second crisis would have been fatal."

The friend's wife says she suspects she would have hesitated to take her husband in had they lived in the United States. But they live in Canada, and so he immediately received top-notch care, without their having to worry about whether it would bankrupt them.

The fear-mongers who criticize Canadian healthcare from their ideological soapboxes do not want to hear real stories, like that of Paul and SadButTrue's friend. No system is perfect, but the Canadian system so surpasses ours that there is simply no comparison.

Supposedly, when Marie Antoinette said "Let them eat cake," she meant well. You could say the same about Schwarzenegger. But his plan is simply more "Let them eat cake."

Time to storm the Bastille.

Check out Les Enragés.org

Take a look at Les Enragés, where "Sad But True" encouraged me to post the story of Paul's death. He did a great job of editing and hand-holding for this neophyte blogger.

Paul's story ended up there because it paralleled that of Sad But True's best friend — a Canadian man who is still alive gratis the Canadian single-payer system. As I believe Paul would be as well had he lived in Canada rather than California.

The difference being that Sad But True's friend went straight-away to the hospital, without worrying if it would bankrupt him. The difference being that the Canadian hospital didn't send that guy away, but instead cared for him.

The difference being that the Canadian hospital took immediate action when it was clear that there was something wrong, rather than dithering about getting the guy to a charity hospital.

I discovered the Les Enragés site via Crooks & Liars, which also linked to Bob Geiger's story. Geiger writes about his brain surgery for acute subdural hematoma — a bunch of blood in his brain. His surgery went well, but during his recovery a conversation with a nurse stuck with him.

"'Do people still die from a subdural hematoma?' I asked one of the nurses, while still in my ICU bed. 'Yes,' she replied. 'Just not people like you.' When pressed for what she meant by that statement, she said 'People with good health insurance, who can afford a neurosurgeon from Scarsdale don't die from these as much.'

As Geiger looked into it, he found that "a large number of people do indeed still die from the inability to easily obtain a 20-minute surgery, a procedure that has become a simple, routine operation for all neurosurgeons."

He began thinking about it: "I'm inherently worth no more as a person than any other husband, father and friend and yet, in the case of a medical crisis like mine -- and more recently, South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson's condition -- the ready accessibility of an emergency procedure can be the difference between life and death," he wrote.

"In one of the richest countries in the world, death should not be the penalty for having no health insurance. Yet, 47 million Americans still have no basic coverage and too many of those would die for lack of the same short procedure I so easily received."

I believe that most Americans have those same values — good values that should be easy to make reality, because doing the right thing, in this case, is also doing the cost-effective thing that benefits everyone.

Ah. Except for the people who are making really big money from the status quo.

And their dollars are able to create advertising that scares the bejeezus out of people. Rationing! Waiting lists! Socialized medicine!

But the reality is that it could be that enough people understand that what we have right now is what's scary. Not the change to a single-payer system, think of it as Medicare for All, where you choose your doctor; you and your doctor choose your hospital, should that become necessary; and the government picks up the tab. And it costs less than what we have right now.

The crazy thing is that so many people believe that cutting taxes doesn't result in deficits — despite that happening every time — but those same folks don't believe that expanding Medicare to all could save money. Despite the fact that every other developed country in the world has universal health care and pays less per capita than we do.



Who are we going to believe? Our lying eyes or William McGuire and the insurance industry? Our United Healthcare premiums allowed McGuire, former CEO of United Healthcare, to retire last year with $1.8 billion in back-dated stock options.

Paul becomes nothing more than collateral damage for a guy like this.