Obamacare is working. Shh, don't tell the Republicans, it will just make their heads explode.

Courtesy of The New Republic:

Republicans made a lot of arguments against the Affordable Care Act. But perhaps none were as effective, or as seemingly plausible, as their contention that their new law would cripple Medicare Advantage. 

New evidence suggests -- surprise! -- that the argument was wrong.

Medicare Advantage is the program that gives seniors the option of enrolling in private insurance rather than the traditional, government-run program. The government pays the insurers a flat fee, per enrollee; in return, the insurers provide coverage, sometimes including benefits that traditional Medicare does not. Overall, about one in four seniors belongs to such plans. 

The policy rationale for Medicare Advantage is two-fold: To give seniors more options and to introduce some private-sector competition. The idea is that private insurers might be able to be more innovative or offer certain combinations of services that some seniors would prefer. But, for much of its history, the program (formerly known as Medicare-plus-choice) was also a form of corporate welfare.

Non-partisan studies, by the likes of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, suggested that the government was paying the insurers too much. 

The architects of the Affordable Care Act decided, quite sensibly, to reduce those extra subsidies and use the money to offset part of the law’s cost. That’s when the Republicans, and their allies, pounced. Taking money away from the insurers, they claimed, would force insurers to charge more, limit their offerings, or pull out of the market altogether. 

It was a reasonable proposition; that’s more or less what happened back in the late 1990s, the first time government reduced the overpayments. (I argued, and still believe, such a trade-off would be worthwhile.) But new information, just released from the administration, suggests those predictions haven’t come true. 

On the contrary, the Department of Health and Human Services announced on Thursday that premiums for the plans are down and enrollment is up, well above the official projections. As the Kaiser Family Foundation has reported, this is actually the second year in a row premiums have declined. (According to HHS, premiums in 2012 will be 11.5 percent below what they were in 2010.) Meanwhile, all Medicare beneficiaries can now get preventative care without co-payments. And their exposure to prescription drug bills have declined, because the new health law is closing the infamous “donut hole” in coverage. 

So, in short, Medicare Advantage plans are becoming cheaper, slightly more people are enrolling in them, and everybody on Medicare -- even seniors in the traditional government-run program -- has better coverage than they did before.

And don't forget that the many of the most important, and positive changes, have not even taken place yet.

For instance check out what is in store in 2014:

NEW CONSUMER PROTECTIONS 

Prohibiting Discrimination Due to Pre-Existing Conditions or Gender. The law implements strong reforms that prohibit insurance companies from refusing to sell coverage or renew policies because of an individual’s pre-existing conditions. Also, in the individual and small group market, the law eliminates the ability of insurance companies to charge higher rates due to gender or health status. Effective January 1, 2014. Learn more about protecting Americans with pre-existing conditions. 

Eliminating Annual Limits on Insurance Coverage. The law prohibits new plans and existing group plans from imposing annual dollar limits on the amount of coverage an individual may receive. Effective January 1, 2014. Learn how the law will phase out annual limits by 2014. 

Ensuring Coverage for Individuals Participating in Clinical Trials. Insurers will be prohibited from dropping or limiting coverage because an individual chooses to participate in a clinical trial. Applies to all clinical trials that treat cancer or other life-threatening diseases. Effective January 1, 2014. 

You keep this in mind at all times. The Republicans do not attack "Obamacare" because it will NOT work.  They attack it because they are terrified that it WILL work.

If you always remember that it will give you the tools you will need to out argue any neo-con piece of garbage that tries to convince you that your President is not working to BETTER the lives of Americans.

And if you are unconvinced of that yourself then perhaps you need to read about this Des Moines couple's experience.

Before I close this post let me leave with a portion lifted from the last eye opening paragraph from the article cited above:

But by the time the next president is sworn in, enough people will have experienced the protections and benefits it offers that no elected official would risk his or her standing by rescinding it.

Free PBS immigration DVD offer to NumbersUSA members

video source: http://youtu.be/mZJvZzw95cE (earlier trailer)

From: Immigration Info - NumbersUSA.com Sent: Monday, July 11, 2011 Subject: PBS offers immigration DVDs to NumbersUSA members

     PBS's veteran broadcaster Bonnie Erbe ( "To The Contrary" ) knows from long experience that NumbersUSA members are among the nation's most interested citizens in the costs associated with mass immigration.
     She has produced an award-winning two-part TV series on immigrations impact on health care reform and the poverty rate. And she has asked us to make the DVD of this series available to you free of charge.
     Simply submit your request for a free DVD here.
     Many of you are already aware of some of staggering effects of mass immigration on health care and poverty. For instance:

• 71 percent of the increase in American uninsured since 1989 is the result of immigrants and their children.
  
• 57 percent of immigrant households (both legal and illegal) with children use at least one welfare program. 

     The PBS DVD provides an opportunity to educate friends, family and all kinds of civic and political groups about the ways in which immigration impacts these critical public policy issues. As a reminder, NumbersUSA took no position on the health care reform bill that passed last year.
       Both pieces feature NumbersUSA Executive Director Roy Beck. We encourage you to contact PBS and request one of the free DVDs.
       Here is PBS press release on the series and this offer:
       FREE PUBLIC EDUCATION DVDS ON IMMIGRATIONS IMPACT ON HEALTH CARE AND THE POVERTY RATE!
      Copies of PBS To The Contrary with Bonnie Erb Special Reports On the impact of immigration made possible by the generous support of The Colcom Foundation.
     (Washington, D.C.) -- The PBS program, To The Contrary's with Bonnie Erb (the only woman-owned news analysis program on national television) is pleased to offer, free of charge, DVD copies of its two-part series on immigrations impact on health care reform and the poverty rate.  This fact-based coverage examines how immigration reform and health care reform are inextricably linked, and how the record influx of new residents is affecting the poverty rate, particularly among children.  NumbersUSA President Roy Beck appeared in both segments.  This educational product is distributed free of charge to those looking to learn more about the true impact of immigration, as it is rarely covered elsewhere by US media.
       For example, coverage of immigrations impact on the health care system included the fact that while illegal immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, the US-born children of illegal immigrants are covered.  It costs approximately $4.6 billion to insure them.
       To The Contrary's coverage of immigrations impact on the poverty rate explained that Census data show an uncanny tie between the rate of immigration and the rate of child poverty.  Of the 14.1 million children living below the official federal poverty line in 2008, 4.4 million were either immigrants or US-born with at least one immigrant parent.
       To The Contrary's special coverage aired nationally on PBS.  Please submit your requests here.  Please be sure to include the name of your organization, how many copies you would like to receive, and a brief explanation of who will see video.  We are happy to fulfill requests for multiple copies of the video for re-distribution to educational groups, students, conferences or interested individuals.

---

The Doritos Factor

¡Hola! Everybody...
I simply no longer have what little patience I had to begin with... I don’t want to change your mind; I don’t care if you “agree” with facts or not; I don’t care what it is you believe in, all I care about is telling the truth.

Period.

A few people have asked that I post something along the lines of "Neoconservativism for Dummies" and I just might attempt it. LOL!

* * *

-=[ Healthcare and Racism in the US ]=-

... minorities... eat more Doritos...

-- Glenn Beck

On the July 23^rd edition of his show on Fox News’, Glenn Beck said, in reference to Obama’s healthcare reform efforts that the “Office of Minority Health” could allow for “litigation against Doritos” since “minorities” may “eat more Doritos.” In the video clip, he offers up Latina racial conservative, Linda Chavez, as a talking head basically supporting the idea that Blacks and other people of color have lower standards of health because, well, they’re stupid and lack impulse control. They eat too many Doritos, as Glenn Beck would have it. Chavez is a prime example what Latino/as call a come mierda -- a shit eater. I will be posting more about her (and her crusade against Latino/as in general and Puerto Ricans specifically) and other conservative minorities at a later date.

For now, it would be safe to say that the prevailing opinion among many conservatives is that blacks and Latino/as suffer from low health outcomes because they choose to participate in high-risk behaviors. I think Linda “Come Mierda” Chavez and Glenn Beck, as well as the millions that watch/ listen to his show would agree with this form of reasoning.

Because it extends beyond individual attitudes and is embedded in our social structures and organizations, race is a strong determining factor in the way Americans are treated and how they fare. White Americans, whether they admit it or not, benefit as individuals and as a group from the current way the social hierarchy is set up. These benefits, running the gamut from educational, economic to political advantages encourage white Americans to invest in whiteness as if it were a form of capital (Lipsitz, 1998). The possessive investment in whiteness is like property. And as a kind of property, its value lies in the right to exclude, or deny, communities of color the opportunity to accumulate assets. Therefore, racism is a dialectic (a dance?) between accumulation on the one hand, and exclusion on the other.

What the Glenn Beck’s of our society deny (with the encouragement of their black and brown enablers) is the fact that white privilege exists and is pervasive. Though discussions of racial inequality often tend to focus almost exclusively on black and brown behavior, something as simple as shopping can be problematic for people of color. Clerks in retail stores are more frequently concerned with the color of shoppers’ skin than with their ability to pay. One clothing franchise, Cignal Clothing, for example, stamped an information form on the backs of personal checks. The form included a section marked “race,” and shoppers were classified “W” for white, “H” for Hispanic, and “07” for black (don’t ask!). After conducting an extensive qualitative study, sociologist Joe Feagin reported, “No matter how affluent and influential, a black person cannot escape the stigma of being black even while relaxing or shopping” (Feagin & Sikes, 1994).

Health care is another realm where significant disparities exist between blacks and whites -- disparities that often literally mean the difference between life and death. The wide gaps in mortality rates and access to primary care between blacks and whites have been noted in newspaper accounts and, more extensively, in the academic literature.

However, similar disparities cut across every aspect of health and health care, and few of these differences can be fully blamed on social status and genetics. For example, The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has reported that that cancer deaths are increasing much faster for blacks than for whites, sometimes by as much as twenty to hundred times as fast. Black women are more likely than white women to die of breast cancer, even though the incidence of the disease is lower among blacks (McBarnette, 1995).

According to the same NCI report, “Black men have a cancer-death rate about 44 percent higher than that for white men” (Squires, 1990). In fact, African American men between the ages of fifty and seventy are nearly three times as likely to die from prostate cancer as white men, and their prostate cancer rate is more than double that of whites.

Now, some of you are probably thinking that these disparities fall under the heading of “Fucked Up Choices Black & Brown People Make,” right?

You would be wrong.

Higher death rates for blacks diagnosed with cancer, for example, are a recent development. In the 1930s, blacks were only half as likely as whites to die of lung cancer. Since 1950, however, the rate of lung cancer deaths among black men has increased at three times the rate for white men. Increases in smoking rates are not the likely cause behind the change. Exposure to environmental toxins and carcinogens, which are disproportionately located in poor and minority communities, is one of the most important reasons for racial differences in cancer death rates (Cooper & Simmons, 1985).

Unequal access to screening, prevention, and treatment are other reasons for the health disparities. One of the chief reasons black women are more likely to die of breast cancer is that they are not diagnosed until the disease has reached an advanced stage (Yood et al., 1999). Even when access is to health care is equal, African Americans are diagnosed at a later stage and are almost twice as likely to die of breast cancer as whites. A study of operable lung cancer found that the rate of surgery for black patients was 12.7 percent lower than that for whites with the same diagnosis. This goes beyond social class or the issue of access to health care. The researchers of this study concluded that the “lower survival rate among black patients... is largely explained by the lower rate of surgical treatment among blacks” (Bach, Cramer, Warren, & Begg, 1999). Similarly, racial differences in mortality rates for cervical cancer remain significant even after controlling for age and economic status, and are more likely attributable to differences in screening and diagnosis (McBarnette, 1995).

Racial differences in hypertension have been well documented and much has been written about its prevalence among low income African Americans. One study, however, rejected the conventional wisdom that hypertension among blacks is genetic, concluding that socioenvironmental factors like the stresses of low job status and income are the chief culprits for the different rates of hypertension (Klag, Whelton, Coresh, Grim, & Kuller, 1991).

Access to advanced diagnostic and treatment procedures for coronary heart disease and related ailments also accounts for the significant differences between blacks and whites. Once differences in age, sex, health care payer, income, and diagnoses for all admissions for circulatory disease or chest pains to Massachusetts hospitals had been controlled for, a 1985 study found that whites underwent significantly more angiography and coronary bypass grafting than blacks (Wenneker & Epstein, 1989). More recent studies confirm these results. One study found that that after controlling for differences in age, gender, severity of disease, comorbidity, geography, and availability of facilities, blacks were 60 percent less likely to have thrombolytic therapy.

However, the most glaring issue in health and race is that of racial bias. Evidence suggests that racial stereotyping and discrimination influence the medical decisions made by doctors. One study (whose findings proved controversial), asked doctors to respond to videotaped interviews with “patients” who were in actuality actors with identical medical histories and symptoms. Only the race and gender of the actors were different (Schulman et al., 1999). It turned out that doctors were significantly less likely to refer black women for aggressive treatment of cardiac symptoms than other categories of patients with the same symptoms. Doctors were also asked about their perceptions of patients’ character traits. Black male actor/ patients, whose symptoms and comments were identical to white male actor/ patients, were perceived to be less intelligent, less likely to participate in treatment decisions, and more likely to miss appointments. Doctors in the study thought that both black men and women would be less likely to benefit from invasive procedures than their white counterparts, less likely to comply with doctors’ instructions, and more likely to come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Put simply, where actor/ patients were identical except for race, black patients were usually seen as low-income members of an inferior group.

Although I am sure most doctors would deny being racist, and probably aren’t intentionally racist, they are not immune to America’s racial history and the resulting cognitive bias. In a groundbreaking article on unconscious racism, Charles Lawrence III observed, “racism is part of our common historical experience and... culture. It arises from the assumptions we have learned to make about the world, ourselves, and others as well as from the patterns of fundamental social activities” (1987)

Discretion is inseparable from the practice of medicine, and combined with other sources of racial bias, it causes the differences in treatment and health care. This pattern of racially biased discretion is similar to patterns found in education and criminal justice.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just the fuckin’ Doritos...

Eddie

References

Bach, P. B., Cramer, L. D., Warren, J. L., & Begg, C. B. (1999). Racial differences in the treatment of early-stage lung cancer. New England Journal of Medicine, 341(16), 1198-1205.

Cooper, R., & Simmons, B. E. (1985). Cigarette smoking and ill health among black Americans. New York State Journal of Medicine, 85, 344-349.

Feagin, J. R., & Sikes, M. P. (1994). Living with racism: The black middle-class experience. Boston: Beacon Press.

Klag, M. J., Whelton, P. K., Coresh, J., Grim, C. E., & Kuller, L. H. (1991). The association of skin color with blood pressure in US blacks with low socioeconomic status. Journal of the American Medical Association, 265(5), 599-602.

Lawrence III, C. R. (1987). The id, the ego, and equal protection: Reckoning with unconscious racism. Stanford Law Review, 39(2), 317-388.

Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

McBarnette, L. S. (1995). African American women. In M. Bayne-Smith (Ed.), Race, gender and health (pp. 51-52). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Schulman, K. A., Berlin, J. A., Harless, W., Kerner, J. F., Sistrunk, S., Gersh, B. J., et al. (1999). The effect of race and sex on physicians' recommendations for cardiac catheterization. New England Journal of Medicine, 340(8), 618-626.

Squires, S. (1990, January 20). Cancer death rate higher for blacks. Chicago Sun-Times p. A5.

Wenneker, M. B., & Epstein, A. M. (1989). Racial inequalities in the use of procedures for patients with ischemic heart disease in Massachusetts. Journal of the American Medical Association, 261(2), 253-257.

Yood, M. U., Johnson, C. C., Blount, A., Abrams, J., Wolman, E., McCarthy, B. D., et al. (1999). Race and differences in breast cancer survival in a managed care population. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 91(17), 1487-1491.

Anal Leakage and Death Panels

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m planning to get away this weekend. It’s a late replacement in my “Summer Flings” series necessitated when my latest co-star decided flings were detrimental to her attachment needs. The stand-in is a veteran Summer Flinger, but a dammed good one!

What?

LOL

* * *

-=[ Big Pharma: The Real Death Panels ]=-

I want either less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.

-- Ashleigh Brilliant (1933-) “street” philosopher

Almost no one points out that the insurance industry stands between you and your doctor. And while you might be one of the lucky few who can afford health insurance, you had better be sure that you don’t get sick. Health insurance is about profit, not health and the only insurance in health insurance is that profits will be placed before people -- all the time.

So, yes, Sarah, there is rationing going on at the rate of over 100,000 preventable deaths -- every year. The highest rate among advanced countries.

And yes, there are death panels, my good friends. They’re part of the most profitable industry in the US (and possibly the world), the pharmaceutical industry, or Big Pharma. Imagine, if you can, that you own a company. You sell widgets. Now imagine if the government spent billions of tax dollars innovating your widgets and then gave the patents to those widgets for almost nothing! I mean, that’s some gangsta shit right there. Well, I’ve just described the economic engine that drives the most lucrative business in America, my friends. Yup, Big Pharma capitalizes on government research, takes the fruits of the research, bends you over, and stretches your anal sphincter without so much as a kiss. I mean, you can lay a lot of fucked up shit at my doorstep, but at least I use lube (most of the time) and occasionally yell out “Yee-haw bitch!” while I’m doing it.

Yet, didn’t I just see your cousin from Texas at a town hall meeting advocating for Big Pharma?

::blank stare::

Actually, the shit Big Pharma does is much more heinous than merely robbing us blind. The collusion between the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, and the congressional oversight committee is downright deadly. I know, I know, you’re saying that the FDA and congressional oversight committees should protect the best interests of you and me, the Joe and Jane Six-pack, as that dimwit calls us. But remember when you voted for less “gub’mint,” as my cousins from Texas call it? Remember the neocon “let the markets solve all our problems, gub’mint is evil” rants? Well, you got it! We have fewer regulations and the rich welfare queens in three-piece suits own the FDA and damn near every congressional oversight committee you ever heard of. Shit, some of these people own your genes, you dumb muthafuckas!

The industry’s aggressive marketing tactics compound this lack of gub’mint oversight. You’ve seen the Claritin and Viagra commercials. They make it seem like these powerful drugs are like just any other consumer product. It’s a perception with deadly consequences. Big Pharma trots out its new drugs in the same way Hollywood opens summer blockbusters. They know how to build interest in a new drug. As a result, new, mostly untested drugs are being given to millions of people as soon as they’re a toothless FDA and the wholly owned prostitutes at congressional oversight committees okay them.

The thing is, when something goes wrong? The reverberations are felt throughout the country. I read somewhere that antidepressants are so widespread, traces of them are found in the drinking water of Texas and other localities. I am not shitting you! It seems like every other month, some new drug is being pulled off the market because heretofore “unknown” side effects (aside from the ubiquitous “anal leakage”) have been discovered. Yeah shit like suicide (as in the case of anti-depressants for children) and liver failure. Yeah, liver failure, you free-market sycophants. Duract, a painkiller that was shown to damage the liver, was prescribed to 2.5 million people in a ten-month period. That’s until Wyeth-Ayerst, Duract’s manufacturer, started yanking it off the shelves when the death totals started racking up. Under pressure from Wyeth-Ayerst, the FDA approved the drug, though there were concerns about its deadly side effects. It approved the drug with the caveat that it would provide a warning to physicians about its toxicity.

Yee-hawww! Bend ovah, muthafuckas!

What about legal consequences, you ask? Well, when you own the FDA, you don’t get punished. GlaxoSmithKline, for example, was “reprimanded” a remarkable fourteen times for misleading consumers about its asthma drugs Flovent and Flonase. I don't know about you, but my mother would only warn me a couple of times. My father had a strict “only two strikes” rule. Pfizer was ‘scolded three times in fourteen months for running deceptive ads hawking Celebrex, their arthritis drug.

There’s no turning back, people. Big Pharma covers its enormous arse by making generous contributions to both sides of the political aisle to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in the last election cycle alone.

And you wonder where they’re getting those goobers to rant and rave at town hall meetings?

Good luck with that...

Love,

Eddie

Wealthcare: Shucking and Jiving for the Massa

¡Hola! Everybody...
OK! Let’s put aside the bullshit and get to some semblance of truth. We here in the US have the most cumbersome, expensive, and dysfunctional health care system in the free world. We pay more for much less and even countries like Cuba have better health outcomes than we do here in the good old USA.

Yet, we have the neocon Kool-Aid drinkers actually advocating against their own self-interest. Watch the video and check out getting the Canadian health care system right. This here is the undiluted truth, people. No Kool-Aid and sugar-free...

* * *

-=[ Wealthcare ]=-

We’re all corporate cheerleaders.

I watch in utter amazement and embarrassment as some Americans go out of their way to advocate against their won self-interest. And like many others, I wonder how it all came to be... How did we all become shills for corporations? Then I heard about Doug Rushkoff's new book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back, and it hit me. the corporate values of business, profit, and consumerism have so infected our lives that we are no longer can conceptualize life in any other way. We are victims of a dysfunctional societal relationship -- one that has come to seem so normal we are almost incapable of processing of how screwed up it really is.

If you are mugged, as Rushkoff was, your neighbors might be more concerned about property values than your health or safety.

The corporation is our new God -- I call it Korporate Kristianity -- my euphemism for fascism. Let’s take the current health care “debate.” corporations are spending $1.4 million a day to pay thousands of lobbyists to defeat any kind of health care reform. We have all heard the lies and misinformation: from “death panels” to rationing to utter disinformation about other national models. Specifically the Canadian and British models have been mercilessly trashed and misrepresented by a media that’s owned by a handful of (yup) corporations.

So, let’s start with our neighbors from the north in Canada. Let’s look at some of the myths being passed around by the gullible idiots on the right:

First? Numbers, as my friend Will likes to point out, don’t lie. If the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear winner. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends far less money on health care for better outcomes.

But let’s be clear: logic isn’t what is fueling this debate, if it was, we would’ve had a single payer option 15 years ago, when the insurance giants promised they would get their act together. Opponents of such a system cite Canada as the best example of what not to do, so it might prove useful to throw light on some myths about the Canadian system.

Canada's health care system is an unmanageable bureaucracy.

Wrong! The opposite is true: the U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn't when everybody is covered.

The Canadian system is more expensive than that of the U.S.

Bullshit! Ten percent of Canada’s GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 percent of its GDP but 15 percent of its population has no coverage whatsoever and millions of others have inadequate coverage. Essentially, the U.S. system is significantly more expensive than Canada’s. Part of the reason for this is uninsured and underinsured people in the U.S. still get sick and eventually seek care. People who cannot afford care wait until advanced stages of an illness to see a doctor and then do so through emergency rooms, which cost considerably more than primary care services.

What the American neocon corporate shills don’t realize is that such care costs about $45 billion per year, and someone has to pay it. This is why insurance premiums increase every year for insured patients while co-pays and deductibles also rise rapidly.

Canada's government decides who gets health care and when they get it.

This is the “I don’t want the gub’mint to tell me what to do” argument. While HMOs and other private medical insurers in the U.S. do indeed make such decisions, the only people in Canada to do so are physicians. In Canada, the government has absolutely no say in who gets care or how they get it. Medical decisions are left entirely up to doctors, as they should be.

There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don't get one no matter what your doctor thinks -- unless, of course, you have the money to cover the cost.

There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care.

Part of the neocon “rationing” scare tactic. There are no waits for urgent or primary care in Canada. There are reasonable waits for most specialists’ care, and much longer waits for elective surgery. Yes, there are those instances where a patient can wait up to a month for radiation therapy for breast cancer or prostate cancer. However, the wait has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with the lack of radiation therapists. Despite such waits, however, it is noteworthy that Canada boasts lower incident and mortality rates than the U.S. for all cancers combined, according to the U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group and the Canadian Cancer Society. Moreover, fewer Canadians (11.3 percent) than Americans (14.4 percent) admit unmet health care needs.

Canadians are paying out of pocket to come to the U.S. for medical care.

I’ve seen too many neocon twats posting this lie on the internet; let me put it to rest. Most patients who come from Canada to the U.S. for health care are those whose costs are covered by the Canadian governments. If a Canadian goes outside of the country to get services that are deemed medically necessary, not experimental, and are not available at home for whatever reason (e.g., shortage or absence of high tech medical equipment; a longer wait for service than is medically prudent; or lack of physician expertise), the provincial government where you live fully funds your care. Those patients who do come to the U.S. for care and pay out of pocket are those who perceive their care to be more urgent than it likely is. In any case, I don’t see any empirical proof that there are throngs of Canadians fighting to come to our hospitals or moving here en masse to escape their horrible (free and guaranteed) health care system.

Canada’s is socialized medicine! The evil gub’mint runs hospitals and doctors work for the gub’mint.

No, goober, you’re incorrect. Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt says single-payer systems are not “socialized medicine” but “social insurance” systems because doctors work in the private sector while their pay comes from a public source. Most physicians in Canada are self-employed. They are not employees of the government nor are they accountable to the government. Doctors are accountable to their patients only. More than 90 percent of physicians in Canada are paid on a fee-for-service basis. Claims are submitted to a single provincial health care plan for reimbursement, whereas in the U.S., claims are submitted to a multitude of insurance providers. Moreover, Canadian hospitals are controlled by private boards and/or regional health authorities rather than being part of or run by the government.

So, there you have it, the undiluted truth. It might you feel uncomfortable and doesn’t jibe with what your daddy told you, but as Will would say: the numbers don’t lie.

Love You Anyway,

Eddie