Sicko2: Sicko Redux

Because sometimes a comment is worthy of a post unto itself:

R. Bobak said...
Pudgy propagandist Michael Moore is dead wrong to paint Canada's sicko socialist healthcare system (where it is illegal for a private citizen to pay for a doctor's services, or to buy private medical insurance) as a panacea for the supposed ills of the American system. We in Canada don't need Moore's boorish and infantile stereotypes. If Moore gets his way, he'd deprive tens of thousands of Canadians from obtaing healthcare in the States- in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Philly- where they are forced to go because our Ontario state-run government health monopoly cannot provide timely treatment. Look to Massachusetts, and look to Quebec -jurisdictions where a private-parallel health system is developing, albeit from different extremes. Do not be conned by those who babble of "universal healthcare" - in Canada, that socialist scheme morphed,in less than 40 years, into a no-patient-choice, waiting-list rationed, state monopoly. In Ontario, healthcare spending alone consumes something like 45% of the entire provincial budget, yet shortages are a constant fact. Quebec's Supreme Court noted,in its 2005 Chaoulli decision, that access to a healthcare waiting list is NOT the same thing as access to healthcare itself. It's unbelievable that a point as clear as this had to go to the provinces' top court, against the howls of protest from pro-medicare activists, who for years successfully parlayed the charade that getting a bill of goods, was the same thing as getting the actual goods. The Canada/U.S. healthcare relationship is a strangely symbiotic one - we both have strengths and weaknesses in healthcare delivery. For Moore to promote an unsustainable monopoly system like ours,where Canadians die on government waiting lists for rationed care, is simply ignorant.

May 25, 2007 3:53 PM

Thanks for the insight, learned friend from the North. I know I for one have never considered how a move towards universal healthcare in America could hurt not only Americans, but Canadians as well. I wish more Canadians would speak up on this issue, many Americans actually believe the fantasy of free, "top-notch" healthcare. They just don't understand that you get what you pay for.