Sarah Palin speaks during the National Tea Party Convention at Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tenn., on February 6, 2010.
Aw shucks, Sarah, that's what neighbours are for.
Political websites and cable news buzzed Monday with word that the family of Sarah Palin, former Republican vice-presidential candidate and darling of the conservative Tea Party protest movement, used to travel from Skagway, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon, to receive health care, when she was growing up.
"Believe it or not - this was in the '60s - we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse," the Calgary Herald quoted her as saying at a public-speaking event in Calgary on the weekend.
"I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn't that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada."
Aha, crowed Sam Stein, on the liberal Huffington Post website.
"Palin now views Canada's health-care system as revolting, with its government-run administration and 'death-panel'-like rationing," he blogged Monday. "Clearly, however, she and her family once found it more alluring than, at the very least, the coverage available in rural Alaska."
The Conservative website Reason.com rebutted, correctly, that Canadian public health care was in its infancy in the 1960s, so this was hardly a case of a family abandoning American private care for the superior Canadian alternative.
KD Braden, a spokesperson at Whitehorse General Hospital, said it wasn't and isn't uncommon for Americans to seek treatment in Whitehorse. There was and is a fee. The difference is that, back in the 1960s "they paid it quite happily, because it was very, very reasonable," whereas today the fees are such that "they're not always happy to pay."
Ms. Palin's memory is flexible. The Washington Post pointed out that, in 2007, she told a similar story, only the family travelled by ferry to Juneau rather than by train to Whitehorse for treatment.
Perhaps she will clear up the contradiction next month. Ms. Palin is scheduled to speak in Hamilton in April.