The likely victory of Barack Obama and creeping socialism suggests that a few brief personal anecdotes about Canadian socialized medical care may be amusing to your readers in the USA.

You want free government healthcare because you hurt and a hip replacement costs a fortune and you can’t walk and you live in Nova Scotia? Three year waiting list.

So you go to Montreal where you know someone in the loop and jump to the head of the line. Why not? Everybody in Canada does it.

Or maybe you’re a surgeon like my brother, forced to operate in a major city in August in a steaming hot operating room which is not air conditioned, while two floors above, the air conditioned offices of the government administrators are cool and pleasant. So, like him, you move to the US.

Or maybe, like my friend, you are bleeding internally, white as a sheet and in pain and you go to the emergency unit at the hospital and the parking attendant on duty, at 1:00 am, takes your five bucks (no tickee no washee) and you wait eleven hours in a truly crummy waiting room because there’s no doctors. (They must be in the US, but the 24/7 parking attendants are not.)

So after your eleven hour wait you are put in a bed on an IV drip out in a busy corridor, head to foot with eight other beds while people stream by, up and down the corridor and the ones who talk and laugh the loudest are the unionized government staff.

How about your father who is 77 and has a pile of gallbladder pain and who doesn’t want to bother the head of emergency services at the biggest hospital in the second biggest city, who is his friend for 50 years, so he waits, and waits. Cranky old guy. Says it builds character. Only one oblique complaint; “The place was full of welfare types. They brought their lunch.” The emergency waiting rooms are empty on sunny summer days and TV hockey nights.

Or maybe you need some blood tests and you go to the local CLSC government clinic. You go early, at 6:45 am in February at 20 degrees below zero and it opens at 7:00 am and 50 people are already lined up outside the door.

But it’s free, right? Except that I heard that Bush, Kerry, Gore, Obama, McCain et al. have to divulge their finances and they make a lot of money and pay maybe 25% income tax (correct me if I’m wrong). In Canada you pay that rate when you earn around $30,000.

In Montreal you buy a new house for, say, $200K, you also pay $28,000 sales tax.
New car? 13% sales tax. Phone bill? ditto.

But the government medical care is free, right?

I read that Mr. Obama wants to do things more like Europe and Canada.

Don’t get sick.

Cosmeau Bugleweed