William Kristol urges Republicans to stop Obama's health care reform in its tracks:
This is the week to highlight every problem, every terrible provision, in the Democratic bills: from taxes and spending to government control and rationing to federal funding for abortion and government-required death-with-dignity counseling sessions for the elderly. Throw the kitchen sink at the legislation now on the table, drive a stake through its heart...and kill it.
He knows what's at stake. Americans have to be frightened away from affordable universal health care coverage at all costs.
After all, look at the horrors of "socialized medicine" in neighboring Canada. Apparently poor oppressed Canadians are desperate to escape endless lineups for care. Stomped under the boot of heartless bureaucrats standing between them and their doctors, they pine for the medical freedoms their neighbors to the south enjoy.
At least that's the story Republicans and the private US health insurance industry have tried to push, helped by their right-wing and corporate enablers in Canada. (Leaving aside the question for the moment of "socialized medicine." Doctors in Canada are not government employees. They just bill the government, instead of their patients or an insurance company, for their services.)
So what's the real story?
Here's a new poll that shows what Canadians really think about their single-payer universal health care system (PDF):
7-in-10 Canadians say that Canada’s health care system is working well. Nationally, 70% of Canadians said the system was working very well (12%) or fairly well (58%). 28% of respondents said the system was not working well, including 9% who said the system was not working well at all. There is strong support for the view that the system is working well in most regions of the country.
But there are problems with the system, right? Republicans keep saying so and touting the cases of people who've crossed the border for health care, fed up with waiting in those "long lines" for care. (Those cases have been in a few specialized areas, like knee and hip replacement and cataract surgery, and localized to certain regions, and certainly don't apply to general basic care, but what the heck, they'll cite it to condemn the whole system. They don't have to be bound by facts do they? They're Republicans after all!)
So would Canadians really be ready to trade in their universal single payer health care system for American style medical health care nirvana? Not on your life:
By an overwhelming margin, Canadians prefer the Canadian health care system to the American one. Overall, 82% said they preferred the Canadian system, fully ten times the number who said the American system is superior (8%). Once again this was the prevailing viewpoint across all demographic groups nationwide, with resistance being highest once again in Quebec. Where one-in-five (19%) said they preferred the American system.
In BC, where the right-leaning provincial government has done all it can for years to destroy the provincially delivered system to make it more like privatized US-style health care, and where premiums are among the highest in Canada ($1200 annually for a family), that preference for Canadian-style universal single-payer over a privatized American-style system is a full 90%, the highest in Canada. In fact, in Canada nationally, "only 12% think that more of the health system should be private."
No wonder Kristol and his fellow movement conservatives want to derail "Obamacare." They can't risk letting Democrats deliver something to the American people that they might like as much as Canadians like their system. They can't risk letting Americans get such a system and understand just what they've been deprived of all these years. Better to frighten them off before they get a taste of even the Dems' watered-down "socialized medicine."