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Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Single Payer Healthcare, eh?

Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.

The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires' case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn't properly filled out a form. At death's door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better.

Sound like a good situation to you? It sure doesn't to me, but if it does, make sure you vote Obama this November. (haha)

Claude Castonguay, "the father of Quebec medicare," and consequently, the entire Canadian single payer healthcare system, now advocates giving a greater role to the long-shunned private sector. "We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it," says Castonguay.

Apparently, they were wrong. But don't tell liberal legislators and lobiests in the States that -- don't even try to break the delision that Big Government can fix everything for everyone, even when it has been demonstrated (in Canada and elsewhere) that it cannot.

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