Greetings, and welcome to Sunday, November 15, 2026. A hundred years ago today, NBC launched the first national radio network. For an old radio guy, that’s worth a toast. It’s also game day: the Bills are at the Jets at 1 PM ET on CBS, so get your chores done early.
My calendar says it’s America Recycles Day, Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day, I Love to Write Day, Philanthropy Day, and Bundt Day. Take out the recycling, then clean out the fridge, and toss that Thanksgiving-adjacent mystery container in the back before it applies for statehood. Writers, write something. I’m doing my part, and you're reading it. Give to a cause you believe in, and bake a Bundt cake for the game. And remember, recycling is great, unless it’s the same tired policies Albany keeps sending back out every session.
Today in History:
1777: The Continental Congress approves the Articles of Confederation and sends them to the states for ratification.
1806: Explorer Zebulon Pike spots the Colorado mountain that will later be named Pikes Peak.
1864: Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army sets fire to much of Atlanta and begins its March to the Sea.
1889: A military coup in Brazil deposes Emperor Pedro II and proclaims a republic.
1926: The National Broadcasting Co. goes on the air with a four-hour gala broadcast, launching the first national radio network.
1939: President Franklin Roosevelt lays the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.
1959: Four members of the Clutter family are murdered in Holcomb, Kan., the crime Truman Capote chronicles in In Cold Blood.
1969: Roughly half a million demonstrators rally in Washington against the Vietnam War, among the largest antiwar protests in American history.
1985: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving Ireland an advisory role in Northern Ireland affairs.
Birthdays Today include: William Herschel, astronomer who discovered Uranus; Georgia O’Keeffe, painter; Curtis LeMay, Air Force general; Ed Asner, actor from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Lou Grant; Petula Clark, singer from “Downtown”; Sam Waterston, actor from Law & Order; Beverly D’Angelo, actress from National Lampoon’s Vacation; Kevin Eubanks, guitarist and bandleader on The Tonight Show; and “Macho Man” Randy Savage, pro wrestler. If today’s your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us here.
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We’ve been told again and again just how wonderful government healthcare is. Free! Universal! Compassionate! Just look at Canada, the progressives say, as if they were showing off a new kitchen. Thing is, the truth keeps leaking out. From Fox News:
Kristin Logan and Donovan James say they moved to Canada with their sights set on the financial and medical benefits of publicly funded healthcare — but say they encountered a “dystopian” system that offered medically assisted death before cancer treatment, prompting them to return to the United States.
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“It was the most heartbreaking experience, to basically be set up to die. And if I wanted to live, I had to take my life into my own hands and leave the country. It’s pretty dystopian to think about now, to get information about ways that I can end my life and what the end of my life looks like before I’d even gotten an oncology appointment,” Logan continued.
Wait... what?
Yes, you read that right. Logan, a U.S. Air Force veteran, was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer in September 2023 at age 43. According to the couple, the first option the Canadian system put in front of her was not chemo, not surgery, not even a meeting with a cancer doctor. It was Medical Assistance in Dying, which Canada calls MAID because “state-administered lethal injection” polls badly.
It gets worse:
James said Canadian medical providers told the family there were “no plan[s] to operate on her,” that a hospital helicopter was unavailable for a transfer to Vancouver and that a doctor advised Logan to “leave the country” if she had the means. The family ultimately traveled to the United States for treatment.
“Kristin was deteriorating really fast… Ultimately, we had to pull the plug and take her off the machines at the hospital and risk everything to put her in the car, drive all the way down Vancouver Island, sail across the ocean straight on a ferry, continue down over the border back into Seattle to get her immediate emergency surgery,” James said.
“The surgeon said had she waited another day, she would have gone septic and died in Canada,” he continued.
I don't think I can add any impact to that verbal picture. A Canadian doctor, working inside the system the left holds up as the model for America, quietly told a dying woman that her best medical option was to get out of the country. That was the honest advice. Logan made three trips back to the U.S. for care before the couple gave up and moved back for good in May 2025.
Fairness check: Health Canada understandably didn’t respond to Fox’s request for comment, and the account is the couple’s. But you don’t need to take their word alone. The numbers back them up.
The Fraser Institute’s latest Waiting Your Turn report put the median wait from a GP referral to actual treatment at 28.6 weeks in 2025, the second-longest wait the institute has recorded since it began tracking in 1993. In British Columbia, where Logan lived, the median hit 32.2 weeks. For gynecology specifically, Fox cites Fraser data showing a 25-week wait just to see the specialist, then another 15.6 weeks until treatment.
That’s more than 40 weeks. For a woman with stage four ovarian cancer, 40 weeks is basically a death sentence, and the system had already handed her the paperwork to make it official.
She wasn’t the only one who ran for the border. The Fraser Institute estimates that more than 105,000 Canadians left the country for medical treatment in 2025, a 66% jump over the last decade. Universal coverage, it seems, includes a road map to the border. and a better health care system.
Meanwhile, the express lane stays wide open. Health Canada’s own Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying counted 16,499 MAID deaths in 2024, 5.1% of all deaths in the country. That’s roughly one in 20 deaths. And the most common diagnosis among the people Canada helped die? Cancer. So the system can’t get a cancer patient in front of an oncologist inside of 40 weeks, but it has euthanizing cancer patients down to a science.
If this sounds familiar, it should. In 2022, retired Cpl. Christine Gauthier, a paraplegic Paralympian, told a House of Commons committee that Veterans Affairs Canada offered her, in writing, an assisted death, equipment included, after she spent five years fighting for a wheelchair ramp. She asked for a ramp. They offered her a coffin. The government blamed one bad-apple caseworker until a Conservative MP said he knew of at least eight veterans who got the same pitch.
And earlier this year, David Strom at HotAir wrote up the case of a woman in her 80s who was euthanized with the help of a husband experts described as suffering “caregiver burnout.” Remember when the left called “death panels” a conspiracy theory? Canada didn’t need a panel. It just needed a form.
Note who decided to fix part of this. Alberta, the most ostensibly conservative province in the country, passed a bill barring doctors from bringing up MAID before the patient raises it. Everywhere else in Canada, your doctor can still open the conversation. That’s how Kristin Logan heard about ending her life before she heard about treating her cancer.
Now, why would a “compassionate” system move this way? Ask Canada’s own Parliamentary Budget Officer. In 2020, while lawmakers debated expanding MAID through Bill C-7, the PBO ran the numbers and concluded that MAID would reduce provincial health care costs, with the existing law plus the expansion adding up to about $149 million in savings, mostly from end-of-life care nobody would need anymore.
To be fair, the PBO insisted its report should “in no way” be read as a reason to use MAID to cut costs. (Ha! Of course it did!) But a government that runs the budget, sets the rationing, and writes the euthanasia rules doesn’t need a memo telling it what to do. It just needs a spreadsheet, and now it has one.
The bottom line is that Kristin Logan was too expensive to spend any effort on. A stage four cancer patient means surgery, chemo, ICU time, maybe a helicopter. MAID means one appointment on the government's dime and everything else including burial costs falls on the individual families. Any bureaucrat staring at a 40-week queue and a fixed budget can do that math, and Canada’s did.
Remember what I’ve been telling you: When government runs health care, every health care decision becomes a political decision. When the government pays for your treatment and your death, it doesn’t take long to figure out which one it would rather pay for.
Kristin Logan figured it out. She’s alive because she had a passport and a car. She escaped "free" health care for all, and lived to tell about it.
Abe Lincoln in his 1862 address to Congress, labeled America "the last, best hope of earth."
With that in mind, next time some Democrat tells you America needs “Medicare for All,” ask him where Americans are supposed to drive to.
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Thought for the Day: A century ago today, NBC brought the news into America’s living rooms. A hundred years later, Americans are still deciding whether to believe it.
VIP Members: How many of you are aware of similar happenings, people escaping Canada's healthcare system so they might live? Your voice matters.
Take care, Gang... and let's meet here tomorrow.