Double ouch!

First off, my apologies. The links to the AARP and Heritage Foundation pages aren’t broken. Dumbo here copied and pasted the URLs and somehow included a quotation mark in both. These two links should work for you. I also noticed that the link to The Daily Caller sends you to my previous post. This one here should work for you as well.

Second, I wasn’t picking on a person or looking for low-hanging fruit. The Canadian argument has been part of the debate over healthcare for a long time and I thought focusing only on one small piece of the overall debate would give us an opportunity to discuss and perhaps all decide whether we think it’s relevant to the issue of health care in America or not. That was the experiment.

I also thought it was a good choice because The Daily Caller article is a perfect example of why I’m such a skeptic, especially on issues where the stakes are high and the passions run deep. (I’ve been around too long and seen too much not to be.) When I see a headline like, “Thousands fled Canada for health care in 2011,” I’m especially skeptical because, as the old saying goes, figures don’t lie, but liars know how to figure. I always check the citation for the figure, and then try to put it in context like, for instance, what percent of the Canadian population 46,159 is.

I also think about what may be left out. For instance, how many Canadian snowbirds here in the Valley every winter have to seek medical treatment? Do we expect them to fly home and go to the hospital?

(By the way, my Spidey Skeptic Sense is so finely tuned, I notice things like the Centrum Silver ad that touts the pill’s use in a long-term study of vitamins, but never tells you what the results of the study were! Gee. I wonder why not.)

Anyway, while I think the Canada argument isn’t really relevant, I also never, ever think I know all the answers. For instance, I recently had a great discussion with a friend who is the communications director for the city of Ann Arbor, Mich. about unions. She challenged me to solve the problem of elected officials negotiating contracts with unions that can often determine who gets re-elected. I couldn’t.

So, sorry about the links. Check out the ones that now work and let me know what you think.