Health Care BS

The credibility of single-payer advocates depends largely on their ability to present the Canadian health care system—-the closest real-world example of the medical delivery model they promote—-as superior to the U.S. system. In order to achieve that goal, however, they need some way of discrediting the stories that constantly appear in the media about the poor quality and long waiting lists to which the Canucks are routinely subjected.

One of the more ironic strategies the single-payer crowd has adopted to discredit these unflattering Press reports is to pretend, contrary to all the evidence, that the U.S. news media are somehow unsympathetic to their cause. They actually have the crust to claim that Canada’s woes have been exaggerated. Thus, we have risible assertions such as the following from that reliably mindless purveyer of the party line, Ezra Klein:

As described by the American press, Canada’s health-care system takes the form of one long queue. The line begins on the westernmost edge of Vancouver, stretches all the way to Ottawa … Sadly for those invested in this odd knock against the Canadian system, the wait times are largely hype.

And these people call themselves “reality-based”? Unfortunately for Ezra and others of his persuasion, it would appear that the Canadian news media are also in on the dark conspiracy to exaggerate the wait times endured by so many Canucks. A couple of weeks ago, The Province reported the following:

A young woman suffering severe abdominal pains spent an excruciating 28 hours at Surrey Memorial Hospital with suspected appendicitis … After arriving at ER, she was given a wait-list wristband without getting a chance to tell nurses what she was there for.

Apparently, the London Free Press is also in on the plot:

The night before her fatal heart attack, Amanda Trujillo spent seven hours in a London hospital emergency room, complaining of a strong pain in her left arm as she waited for a doctor who never came.

The only way for Klein and his fellow travelers to cling, as BHO might put it, to their belief that Canadian health care is superior to ours is to pretend that the facts are not the facts. This is consistent with their habit of producing disingenuous analyses which, as I pointed out last week, is one of the reasons I have such difficulty taking them seriously. As long as they stay in denial about the obvious flaws of Canadian health care, their credibility will remain in the toilet.