Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin addresses attendees at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn., on Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010.Ed Reinke
Sarah Palin sees irony in her Alaskan family's visit, when she was a child, to Whitehorse for medical care for her brother. And there is irony, but not the irony the former Republican vice-presidential candidate professes to see.
"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," she told a Calgary audience on the weekend. "Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada."
The irony she implies is insulting: Canada is a stagnant backwater when it comes to medical care. No American in her right mind would come here for treatment; any sensible person knows that all cross-border health care trips go in the other direction.
That's demonstrably false - U.S. residents do come up for cardiac care, for instance - but more on that in a moment. Here is a politician who treats the Canadian system as an exemplar of socialist evil, yet has fond personal memories of that system, in its early years of socialized medicine. The bigger irony is that a politician from the United States, whose health system is besieged by problems, would throw stones at Canadian medicare.
U.S. care is wonderful for those with good insurance - though the co-payments may be huge. But nearly 45,000 deaths a year are linked to a lack of insurance, according to a Harvard Medical School study published in September.
Canada's system is not perfect. It has waiting lists for some important surgeries - though it has been making progress on those. Its costs are rising at a stomach-churning clip - as they are in most of the industrialized world. (They are highest in the U.S.) But on the whole, Canada provides consistent, high-quality, cutting-edge care.
This may surprise Ms. Palin, but U.S. residents (and not just those in border cities) do come to Canada for medical care, though the Canadian system is not really designed for such enterprise. For instance, 20 to 30 people from the U.S. (and some from overseas) head to the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre in Toronto each year, usually for techniques pioneered here in valve repair, according to cardiac surgeon Christopher Feindel. (That might also surprise Danny Williams, the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, who went to Florida this winter to fix a leaking mitral valve, apparently unaware of what Canada had to offer.)
"I think our costs are lower and our outcomes are better, according to World Health [Organization]data," said Dr. Feindel, who studied health-care administration at Harvard University. "And everyone gets access to it. It's not based on finances or on what insurance you might or might not have."
Ms. Palin and others who live in glass houses should remember that if they throw stones, they should consider being treated in Canada for any cuts from flying glass.