[knighthawk]

Ping

[goldstategop]

Mark Steyn nails it! Do we want single payer health care here seeing how poorly its worked in Canada? Toronto's health care system functioned a lot like one in a Third World country than what we would expect from a First World industrial democracy. It responded with slowness and measured alacrity to deal with a potentially lethal illness and in the end if SARS isn't spreading to the rest of Canada it must say something more for Canadians' innate caution than for all the wisdom of their own government. Something to think about when American politicians boast of how well health care in Canada covers the entire population that we should try it here. Then how come we don't have a SARS crisis like Toronto is having? One has to come to the conclusion America's health care system is working beautifully and what's lost on El Poco Loco and other liberal demagogues pushing for a government-run health care plan is don't mess with what works. Americans understand this quite well.

[You Dirty Rats]

Steyn could have titled this "Socialized Medicine Kills People".

The Economist did a Survey of Canada awhile back entitled "Nice country, nice mess". Unfortunately true.

But at least they're not Americans! They'll always have THAT to fall back on. I hope it's enough for them.

[Grig]

And if it ever get to the point where Toronto has to be sealed off, the military probably couldn't do it.

[facedown]

Personally, I'd have been more impressed if he and Aline had had a candlelit dinner for two over a gurney in the emergency room of a Toronto hospital.

What a vivid imagination!

[Norman Conquest]

This is the glorious system Hillary and Gephardt want to bring to the U.S. Ain't we lucky?

[Interesting Times]

Steyn paints a compelling portrait of the inability of leftist thinking to deal with real problems. The Canadian Prime Minister eats a symbolic dinner at a Chinese restaurant, apparently in the belief that this is an adequate response to the failure of Canada's health care system...

In time, the global leftist pandemic will come to an end.

The remaining question is how many more people will die before it finally burns out.

[Tares]

Ping

[Seruzawa]

the Democrats are too dense to understand the implications of what's happening North of us to draw the correct conclusions about a health care system appropriate for the needs of America.

Enough of the sugar coating. There's nothing dense about it. Radical liberals WANT epidemics. They are all over-population junkies. They want at least 5/6s of humanity destroyed. They WANT a health car system that is ineffective. Why else do you think that an ineffective one is the only kind they create when given the power to do so?

It's the radicals that control the organizations and their murderous intent is quite obvious. Obvious that is to anyone who is capable of seeing past the veneer of liberal smokescreens.

[Celtjew Libertarian]

Bookmarked.... And Memorized, if possible.

[EternalHope]

Quite a good article. It lowers my confidence that Canada can beat this, however. We ARE talking about human beings here.

It also helps explain why we still have SARS in its box in the United States. Still, if it reaches pandemic status in Canada we will not be able to keep it out of the U.S. The same comment applies to Mexico.

[per loin]

In rural China, SARS got its start through the population's close contact with farm animals. In Hong Kong, it was spread by casual contact in the lobby, elevators and other public areas of the Metropole Hotel. Only in Canada does the virus owe its grip on the population to the active co-operation of the medical profession.

Steyn missed the mark with this statement. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam had extensive spread of the disease by the medical profession. In fact, it was a medical doctor who brought the disease out of China to Hong Kong. He passed it to the first Toronto victim.

[Dog Gone]

Great piece. I'm sending it to my doctor friends and relatives.

[harpseal]

But in most other Western health care systems the things Ontario failed to do would be taken for granted. There might be a lapse at some point in the chain but not a 100% systemic failure all the way down the line.

I am not all that certain that the US health care system would have handled SARS that much better. If it spreads to the USA we shall see.

[Gritty]

A Steyn BUMP!

[Carry_Okie]

Brilliant work by Mr. Steyn, as usual.

Unfortunately, he gives the US too much credit. We are patsies for this disease because of political correctness and the degree to which we have socialized medicine as well.

Open borders will bring in a flood of the infected and they will sit just as dangerously in the hallways of County USC as Chinese victims did in Toronto.

Bureaucracy is rife in American private medical care too. Consider how hard it is to get past a primary care physician to an infectious disease doc. Note too that an HMO doc spends less than ten minutes with a patient.

There is also the general American attitude that freedom without personal responsibility is equivalent to liberty, that freedom constitutes the latitude to do whatever pleases the individual regardless to the risks to society at large. One outcome of that public faith is the worshipping of "victims' rights." How hard will it be to institute quarrantine in this legal atmosphere after the way gay AIDS patients have been allowed to flout public health laws concerning communicable diseases? Remember the way Irwin Memorial Blood Bank was still recruiting donors in the Castro district of San Francisco? Another result of "freedom without accountability disease" (FAD) is the way Americans also suffer from "hero complex," where even doctors and nurses are encouraged to come to work when they are sick in order to appear committed, while bureaucrats get to think they are saving money on temporary help. My wife at Stanford Medical Center was virtually forced to share a desk yesterday with a physician who recently returned from Taiwan, and he's as sick as a dog. So, whom do I call who has the balls and power to isolate him?

No Mr. Steyn, Canada's disease isn't unique, it's merely in an advanced stage. Anybody who laughs at this doesn't know much about the reality of American healthcare and isn't thinking.

[Paul Ross]

Let's leave it there. If this is what the President of Mount Sinai calls an "amazing job," then we might as well head for the hills screaming "We're all gonna die!" Toronto health authorities have done an amazing job that's amazing only in its comprehensive lousiness. At every link in the chain, anything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Steyn belts it out of the park again.

[kevao]

So this is the kind of health care system Dick Gephardt wants for the U.S.? Doesn't sound so bad.

[stands2reason]

I've got to send this to a co-worker who's totally conservative "except for socialized health care." She needs to know what it really looks like.

[aruanan]

...the decrepitude of socialized health care, which almost by definition is reactive rather than anticipatory, and belatedly so at that.

AKA Hillary Care