BLAME CANADA, Republican Desperation Gives Way to Dishonest Ads

BLAME CANADA, Republican Desperation Gives Way to Dishonest Ads

Here’s Texas GOP Congressman Louie Gohmert, "I know enough about Canadian health care, and it's a bureaucratic, socialistic piece of crap. One in five have to die because they went to socialized medicine.”

And GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnellMitch McConnell speaking this week on ‘Meet The Press’ about a "friend of a friend" who'd lost someone to the bureaucrats of the Canadian health care system.

As per www.calgaryherald.com Conservatives for Patients' Rights, led by Rick Scott, who used to head up Columbia/ Hospital Corporation of America (a firm that pleaded guilty to over-billing, after it was probed for fraud), and Patients United Now, which is funded by the right-wing Americans For Prosperity put out one ad that is the latest installment of socialism-as-the-killer-of-poor-people myth.

Average Americans've largely been left out of the current U.S. debate, save for a coterie of arguably questionable Canuck complainers in the Republican-paid TV attack ads.

Their ad claims that Canadian patients suffer long waits, and then don't even get immediate care, or certain drugs and treatments. All because "the government says patients aren't worth it." That was Stephen HarperStephen Harper's government they were talking about, and while Harper in his pre-prime ministerial cocoon advocated private health care, ran his election campaign on a promise to preserve public health care. These days, the Harper government is certainly not going on record as saying anything about patients not being worth the effort.

In it Shona Holmes, who re-mortgaged her Waterdown, Ontario home to help build up $100,000 for a growth near her pituitary gland treated at the Mayo Clinic. Holmes stars in an ad sponsored by Patients United Now, and she claims Canadian doctors told her a referral to a specialist would take several months. The pitch here is ironically in that it’s actually a plug for Canadian health care, since nobody there has to remortgage their home or scrounge up $100,000 to pay for their health care.

You are not, of course, expected to notice that small item.

Holmes as well admitted that health care is "wonderful" in Canada.

Canadian health-care system prioritizes cases and people whose situations are dire do get in faster; such triaging is done every day with heart bypass surgery and MRIs. Since privacy laws protect patient’s history, including Holmes's health records, it's impossible to know how urgent her condition truly was.

The Toronto Star, Canada's largest newspaper, ran an article about Canadian politicians like MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis asking the government in Ottawa to officially denounce anti-Canada "propaganda" and smear ads now airing on many U.S. channels.

One major party's leader in Canada, the NDP's Jack Layton, is gearing up for a truth-telling mission to the US, much as MSNBC's Ed Schultz is planning the same kind of fact-finding mission to Toronto -- that is, if he can persuade a single Republican Senator to come along.

Thomas Campbell, former Ontario health and economic minister, wrote a piece in the Toronto Star headlined, ‘U.S. Has Much to Learn From Our Health Care.’ In it he notes: “Canada spends more than a third less per capita on health than the United States and still covers everyone, whereas the U.S. system leaves 46 million people without insurance. Since our health statistics are markedly better, average Americans would be healthier and live longer if they lived in Canada. Here, doctors do not have to waste time seeking insurance approvals. Medical need is the only requirement and pre-existing conditions don't matter." While the system's not perfect, Campbell says,he adds that Canadians are so happy with it that: "Our main obstacle to reform is the very success of the system to date. Politicians admit privately that reforms are needed but they hesitate to speak out. This does not make for thoughtful debate."

Comedy Central wild man Lewis Black had his audience roaring on The Daily Show this week, mocking the far right's renewed attacks on Canadian health care.

In the New York Times recently, economist Paul Krugman writes: "There's no question that some Americans who seemingly have good insurance nonetheless die because insurers are trying to hold down their 'medical losses'--the industry term for actually having to pay for care."

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll released on June 20, the average American, whose own agenda focuses on his or her own health, is longingly eyeing a public system. The poll found seventy-two per cent (including fifty per cent of those identifying as Republican voters) want a government-backed public health-care plan established alongside the private system. Fifty-nine per cent think government could keep health-care costs lower than the private sector can, and 50% believe government coverage would be better than what private insurers provide.

A 2005 Harvard University study found that 50 % of the 1,458,000 personal bankruptcies in the U. S. in 2001 were due to medical bills, with an estimated two million Americans afflicted each year. Most of these people were caught in a classic Catch-22 bureaucratic trap, the kind the Canadian single-payer system obviates. These American patients were either out of work or laid off, which meant their employer-paid health insurance was cut off.

“The attacks on Canada's health-care system by Americans gleefully pouncing on the things that are wrong, ignore the far greater number of things that are right,” according to Naomi Lakritz of the Calgary Herald, adding, “(t)he trouble with America's system is that the horror stories are not the extreme exceptions. When 50 per cent of Americans who declare bankruptcy do so because they can't pay their medical bills, those are not a few extreme cases.”

But the Republicans have one problem, as per Mother Nature Network (MNN), Holmes’ story isn’t true. Though Holmes has claimed many times on television that she was diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor in 2005, what doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona removed was a cyst that threatened her vision. Furthermore, her condition has actually worsened since traveling to the United States for treatment, so she had to put a second mortgage on her home to pay for the $100,000 surgery. And that can’t be placed at the feet of the Canadian system.

MNN scrutinized the inaccuracies in the Patients United Now ‘Survivor’ ad starring Holmes, including the claim that a health care system like Canada’s would automatically lead to delayed care. The media watchdog organization, Media Matters, asks, “when Americans cannot afford health care, isn’t that suffering from ‘delayed or denied’ care?” and notes that Obama’s health care plan is not based on Canada’s model.

According to CNN’s Jack CaffertyJack Cafferty, the latest Gallup poll says that only around twenty-seven percent of the members of the US Senate properly understand the health care issue as it has been presented by Mr. Obama.

With a dismal statistic like that, is it any wonder then that the Republican party can throw out inaccurate, misleading bunkum to scare the even more poorly educated masses into being afeared that the Obama plan will lead inevitably to the ‘dreaded’ Canadian (read Socialist) model? Which it will not, by the way.

The Republican party has had an unquestionably horrible year: the loss of the White House, a president with the lowest approval rating in recorded history, the party leadership co-opted by a self-confessed drug-using non-convict/ radio personality, repeated losses at the poll, defections, continuing shrinking membership – it REALLY has not been a happy time to be a Republican these days.

In order to get back to a position of power that they can live with, they decided that one of the many things they have to do is block Mr. Obama at every turn. And obviously, this includes insulting even our nearest neighbors.

Throughout most of her history, Canada has been the kind of neighbor that other nations could only wish they had. Does anyone besides this writer remember what the Canadians did to save and protect members of the US Diplomatic Corps during the height of the Iran Hostage Crisis in the late 1970s?

Clearly, this generation of American Republicans don’t, and also don’t have the moral courage to be ashamed of their behavior.