O Canada!

The True North strong and free...

From Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on HuffPo:

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades -- against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News -- fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Canada's Radio Act requires that "a licenser may not broadcast....any false or misleading news." The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1987. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves. When Stephen Harper moved to abolish anti-lying provision of the Radio Act, Canadians rose up to oppose him fearing that their tradition of honest non partisan news would be replaced by the toxic, overtly partisan, biased and dishonest news coverage familiar to American citizens who listen to Fox News and talk radio. Harper's proposal was timed to facilitate the launch of a new right wing network, "Sun TV News" which Canadians call "Fox News North."

The post is here.

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Brock Lesnar Wants To Talk To You About Health Care.

From the Toronto Star:

Two months after nearly dying in the Canadian wilderness, UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar is healthy and ready to fight – against challengers to his belt and against anyone advocating health care reform in the U.S.

Lesnar still won't say exactly where in Canada he was last November, when a severe bout of diverticulosis made him so ill that his career and long-term quality of life both were jeopardized, but in a conference call to announce his return to action he blasted the hospital system here.
"They couldn't do nothing for me," he said Wednesday. "It was like I was in a Third World country. ... I'm just stating the facts here, and that's the facts. If I had to choose between getting care in Canada or in the United States, I definitely want to be in the United States."

The disdain the UFC heavyweight champion, who calls himself a "Conservative Republican," feels for Canada's health care system bubbled over after a November hunting trip.

For about a year beforehand Lesnar had suffered from intermittent stomach pains, fatigue and flu symptoms, but worked through the discomfort, which U.S. doctors eventually diagnosed as mononucleosis.

But the symptoms persisted and drained him so badly that he had to cancel a Nov. 21 title defence against Shane Carwin. With his calendar suddenly wide open he headed to Canada for a hunting trip, where sharp stomach pain and a 40C fever sent him into shock and into hospital.

When Lesnar arrived at the hospital – three hours' drive from his Canadian cabin but within driving distance of Bismarck, N.D. – he said doctors were unhelpful, and unable to diagnose him because of malfunctioning equipment.

After his wife checked him out and drove him to a hospital in Bismarck, doctors diagnosed him with diverticulosis, a condition characterized by inflamed and perforated pouches in the lining of the intestine.

Lesnar says his poor treatment in Canada and quick diagnosis in America confirm his belief that the U.S. should resist any attempts to socialize its health care system.

As an uninsured American with a pre-existing condition, I have been longing to hear the health care reform views of a right-wing UFC fighter who ignored his stomach pains for a year before they resulted in his body going into shock while on a hunting trip. Since only crooks and cops hunt in populated places, the still-unnamed medical facility that treated Lesnar was--as the newspaper item indicates--obviously in a remote area of rural Canada.

(Tie your guts in knots in rural America, numbnuts. Do you think you'll be airlifted to the Mayo Clinic?)
Prediction: Lesnar will be a featured guest on Fox News within a month, where he'll be welcomed not as the musclebound asshole who ignored severe stomach pains while embarking on a Yukon hunting trip, but as a health care expert with credentials rivaling those of Sarah Palin, the newest nitwit in the Fox stable of unstable fools.

UPDATE: Erstwhile JackRabbit Cafe´contributor TBLMISBT--who is not on performance-enhancing drugs--passes this along...

The Alaskan Asshat Is Punk'd Again.

Oh, Canada!

At a recent stop on her "Going Rogue" book tour, Sarah Palin told Canadian comedian Mary Walsh that Canada should get rid of its public health care system.

Walsh is the co-creator and star of This Hour Has 22 Minutes -- a nightly news parody show in the same vein as The Daily Show -- and she arrived in character, as the conservative Marg Delahunty, to the Borders where Palin (the "Alaskan Aphrodite") was signing books.

"I just wanted to ask you if you have any words of encouragement for Canadian conservatives who have worked so hard to try to diminish the kind of socialized medicine we have up there." Walsh shouted to Palin as she approached the table.

Palin's handlers tried to help her by ushering Walsh out of the Borders, but Palin could not be deterred. When Palin left the signing, Walsh caught up with her in the parking lot, where Palin suggested that Canada should get rid of its public health care system. "Keep the faith" Palin said, "because common sense conservatism can be plugged in there in Canada too. In fact, Canada needs to reform its health care system and let the private sector take over some of what the government has absorbed."

Raw Story points out that it is unlikely this plan will go over well among Canadians -- even among conservatives.

A recent study found that 90 percent of Canadians support universal, single-payer health care. A poll taken last summer shows 82 percent of Canadians believe their health care system to be better than the US's, despite constant grumbling about waiting times for treatment of non-life-threatening conditions.

Elsewhere in AsshatLand:

Oh, Canada!

Graphic courtesy of Health Insurance 2008.

President Obama calls spiraling U.S. health care costs a "ticking time bomb." Almost 50 million Americans aren't covered, while every Canadian has access to care.

Why is the United States so late to the game?

Canadians I have known love their country's health care system. The people who don't want the U.S. to move toward serious health care reform--particularly those railing against a single-payer system--have been lying about Canada's successful and popular health care for years (that means you, Betsy McCaughey.) To hear the dissemblers tell it, the typical Canadian wait for care is longer than a typical American waits for the truth on FOX News. And we all know how long that's been.

Here's Bill Mann of dcweasels.com, via HuffPo, with a personal account of health care in the Great White North:

The scare ads and op-ed pieces featuring Canadians telling us American how terrible their government health-care systems have arrived - predictably.

There's another, factual view - by those of us Americans who've lived in Canada and used their system.

My wife and I did for years, and we've been incensed by the lies we've heard back here in the U.S. about Canada's supposedly broken system.

It's not broken - and what's more, Canadians like and fiercely defend it.

Example: Our son was born at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital. My wife got excellent care. The total bill for three days in a semi-private room? $21.

My friend Art Finley is a West Virginia native who lives in Vancouver.

"I'm 82, and in excellent health," he told me this week. "It costs me all of $57 a month for health care, and it's excellent. I'm so tired of all the lies and bullshit I hear about the system up here in the U.S. media."

A Canadian-born doctor wrote a hit piece for Wingnut Central (the Wall Street Journal op-ed page) this week. David Gratzer claimed:

"Everyone in Canada is covered by a single payer -- the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system."

Vancouverite Finley: "That's sheer b.s."

I heard Gratzer say the same thing on Seattle radio station KIRO this week. Trouble is, it's nonsense.

We were always seen promptly by our doctors in Montreal, many of whom spoke both French and English.

Today, we live within sight of the Canadian border in Washington state, and still spend lots of time in Canada.

Five years ago, while we were on vacation in lovely Nova Scotia, the Canadian government released a long-awaited major report from a federal commission studying the Canadian single-payer system. We were listening to CBC Radio the day the big study came out.

The study's conclusion: While the system had flaws, none was so serious it couldn't be fixed.

Then the CBC opened the lines to callers across Canada.

Here it comes, I thought. The usual talk-show torrent of complaints and anger about the report's findings.

I wish Americans could have heard this revealing show.

For the next two hours, scores of Canadians called from across that vast country, from Newfoundland to British Columbia.

Not one said he or she would change the system. Every single one defended it vigorously.

Further proof:

Not long ago, the CBC asked Canadians to nominate and then vote for The Greatest Canadian in history. Thousands responded.

The winner? Not Wayne Gretzky, as I expected (although the hockey great DID make the Top 10). Not even Alexander Graham Bell, another finalist.

The greatest Canadian ever?

Tommy Douglas.

Who? Tommy Douglas was a Canadian politician - and the father of Canadian universal health care.

If you are on the fence about a single-payer "Canadian-style" health care system in the U.S., please do some research of your own before swallowing the naysayers stories.

Better yet, ask a Canadian.

Run For Coverage.

If you don't think that the for-profit health care system in the United States needs reform, you probably don't have a preexisting medical condition.

I do, and so does Maggie Yount.

From David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times:

San Marcos resident Maggie Yount wasn't surprised when the letter from insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross arrived the other day. Yet she couldn't help but be frustrated.
"Some medical conditions, either alone or in combination with the cost of medication, present uncertain medical underwriting risks," Anthem informed her. "In view of these risks, we find we are unable to offer you enrollment at this time."

In other words, no health coverage for you.

Yount, 24, finds herself in that cloudy area in which a "preexisting condition" makes her too great a risk in the eyes of money-minded insurance companies. And so she's being excluded from the system.
"It looks like I'll just have to be very, very careful about everything," Yount told me. "But what kind of way is that to live your life?"

Great question.

Read the rest here.