Health Care Reform Makes You Stupid, Whorish

I'm sure that all of my American friends have seen this commercial by a group called Patients United Now about 7,000 times.



That's Shona Holmes and she's the Susan Boyle of the American ring these days. Frumpy, but Jesus can she emote! The only problem is that the ad is dishonest in both fact and implication.

How do I know this? Because she's currently suing the government of Ontario and her suit directly contradicts most of what she's saying on the TV machine.

As you might have noticed, Ms. Holmes referred to death or dying at least twice in the Patients United spot. Her Statement of Claim, however, states that she indeed had a "fluid filled sac" in her brain, which may have led to blindness. For the record, I, too, have a fluid-filled sac which can cause blindness, if only temporary and usually in someone other than myself, but not always. For example, my eye still stings from yesterday's essay on Stormy Daniels.

While I'm pretty sure that being blind would suck, I know as a medical certainty that it is a very different condition from death. I know this because I saw Ray Charles in concert once. If he was actually deceased in 1992, he sure fooled me, and this would of course make the show even more memorable.

Canadian politicians are forever decrying the notion of a "two-tier" health care system, which is how they justify banning most private delivery systems. The argument is that if private care were allowed, there were be two standards of care based upon the ability to pay.

This contention is all the proof you need that Canadian politicians are stupid, dishonest, or both. You see, there's already a two-tier health care system in Canada that provides treatment based solely on the ability to pay. The upper tier just happens to be the United States. If you want to run off and mutilate your fucking noggin like Michael Jackson did, there are any number of American doctors willing to accommodate you. The Canadian taxpayer, however, will not, and rightly so. why should we subsidize any more weirdness than we already do with the Liberal Party?

In the ad, Shona descries "government-run health care", but her 2007 suit suggests that something else might be at issue. You see, since she could ultimately afford to seek treatment in the United States, she could have done so from the get-go. Instead, she dicked around here until she discovered that her case was a low medical priority. It was then that she blazed a trail to Scottsdale.

Her problem is that she doesn't think that she should pay for it. Shona and her shysters seem to be arguing that government financed health care is fine, but they shouldn't be "running" it, whatever the fuck that means. As you may not have known, Ms. Holmes is seeking reimbursement for her expenses in Arizona. From the government. Of Ontario. Which is in Canada.

Allow me to digress for a moment and explain how our system works. You go to your general practitioner and think something's wrong. If your doctor thinks something is, you're referred to a specialist. In serious cases, this happens immediately. Your case is weighed against all of the others pending and prioritized. If your case is serious and care cannot be provided in a timely fashion, the Ontario Health Insurance Plan will pay for you to go to another jurisdiction, usually, but not always, the United States.

The U.S is chosen primarily for reasons of geography. Look at a map of Ontario. See that part that juts like a dagger into the American Midwest? That's where all the people live.

I suspect that somewhere along the line, Shona Holmes started relying on her own medical judgements. You'll note that the Toronto Star story that I'm citing or her lawsuit makes no reference to her condition being lethal, but she does in the Patients United Now ad.

She made her decisions and now she wants to be paid for them. As an Ontario taxpayer, she means me. Something tells me that this isn't quite what Patients United Now has in mind. Holmes' entire lawsuit is predicated on the idea that access to free health care is a constitutional right, presumably based on the "Security of the Person" clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Most constitutional scholars will tell you that a right is something that the government is precluded from denying you, regardless of your financial situation. If you have a constitutional guarantee to health care and cannot afford it, it follows that the state should pay for it. This is distinct from the right of free speech being predicated on having your own printing press as virtually everyone is unequal to the task of removing their own spleen.

Remember, as I write this, Shona Holmes is seeking to get paid for her private decision to seek care in America. Furthermore, she argues that it is her Charter right to be so compensated, even as she challenges the constitutionality of the very system that she's seeking payment from.

If Patients United Now knew about the Holmes litigation - and I can't imagine that they didn't - that tells you everything you need to know about them.

Shona Holmes isn't the only star in the burgeoning industry of health care advertising, now the fastest growing sector of the American economy. Remember the might Harry and Louise, who single-handily almost brought Bill Clinton's presidency low?



It was a more innocent time, 1994. If you're too young to remember it, just ask Monica Lewinsky or O.J Simpson.

Well, Harry and Louise are back, doughier and considerably less American than they were in those halcyon days when Nirvana still strode the earth.







If I've seen this once, I've seen it a thousand times. Harry and Louise has drank deeply from the teat of Big Compassion and they've sold their souls for some of that mother's milk. they, too, have a crush on Obama, yet neither is as excusably hot as Amber Lee Ettinger, which is the real tragedy here.

They're whores, I tells ya! Whores! There's something about health care reform that makes people veer wildly on what are supposed to be bedrock beliefs. It doesn't matter if it's Patients United Now and Shona Holmes or Harry and Louise. reform makes you either prostitute yourself or become an idiot, although the two are by no means mutually exclusive.

Look, I sort of resent the American right making my country's political decisions as the boogeyman for their country's inability to get anything done. On the other hand, it is pretty funny to watch.

The simple fact of the matter is that the United States can't afford Canadian-style health care. They don't have the money and chances are that they never will. Social Security, Medicare, myriad military commitments, and general unwillingness to pay for anything are going to wipe them out financially by the middle of the century. That being the case, now probably isn't the time for new goodies.

The merits of the Canadian system shouldn't even be a secondary consideration, and wouldn't be if everyone wasn't so goddamned dumb.

But the debate is endlessly entertaining, ain't it?