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It's not like I've been overcome with esteem from John McCain throughout this primary, but this is pretty sick:
“But before you decide to sign on to that kind of a program, go to Canada, or go to European countries that have government-run health care systems,” he continued. “My friends, they don’t work, they’re inefficient, and they end up in a two-tiered system where the wealthiest can afford to pay for their own health care and those with low income sometimes wait six or eight months for a routine kind of treatment. And that’s what I’m not going to let happen to the United States of America.”We have a two tiered system in America in which the wealthiest can afford to pay for their own health care and we let the poor die. And I mean "die" in the literal sense. Here's another source on the 18,000 who die every year due to lack of health insurance, if you're interested. That's the rough equivalent of six 9/11s every year. Moreover, while it's true that Canada and England have waiting times for routine care (though not lifesaving care, and they've have no wait times at all if they spent what we spend), Germany, France, Japan, and others have no waiting times at all. And we have waiting times too, we just hide them by refusing to collect or release data on the problem, and by pricing people out of care, so they never get it. In other countries, when you're poor and seek care, you sometimes have to wait to get it. In our country, you never get the care at all, and so you never have to wait for it, and then we happily pat ourselves on the back for our short waiting times. It's perverse.So to be clear on what's going on here, McCain, in order to wrest a slim and transient political advantage, is obscuring the murderous costs of our health care system and misrepresenting the alternatives we could plausibly implement. I realize we're all supposed to remain sardonic and cynical above this sort of posturing, but it's sick and it's cruel and real people -- and thousands of them -- die because Republicans are afraid that health reform will result in a political win for Democrats. And it's particularly grotesque coming from John McCain, who's been on government health insurance since the day he was born. Someone should ask him how long he's had to wait.
