Instead of prescription drugs, we're now importing single-payer advocates from Canada.
As if we didn’t have enough of the domestic variety already.
Apparently not.
Yesterday, Jack Layton, a Canadian politician and leader of the leftie New Democratic Party, visited DC to speak with Congressional Democrats, White House officials, and to deliver a speech on health care reform at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
The accommodation afforded Jack Layton is especially troubling given the fact that the Obama Administration has refused to involve key Americans policy leaders in the health care reform dialogue. Indeed, the Obama Administration has shunned prominent free-market healthcare policy organizations in March when it held a White House summit on the issue. The Manhattan Institute, the Pacific Research Institute, CMPI, and the Galen Institute, just to name a few, were among the organizations not extended an invite to participate.
We are not amused.
Yet Administration officials and Democratic leaders in Congress have time to meet with a Canadian politician of a non-governing party.
In advance of Mr. Layton’s trip down, the NDP sent a letter announcing that:
“Today, Jack Layton flies to Washington D.C. to help President Obama in his fight for universal health care. And to fight to protect our cherished Medicare back here in Canada.”
Stop the presses.
In his remarks at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, Mr. Layton declared, “There is no doubt that strengthening of our system in Canada will be easier with public health care in the United States. Just as Canada built a strong public health system through a united effort, and just as America must do the same, so too can we strengthen and reinforce the health of all of our citizen through partnership.”
It sounds as if politics back home is driving this effort on Layton’s part and not an interest in advancing health care for Americans. Last time we looked (and we look regularly) there is no serious effort (alas!) to reform the Canadian healthcare system.
Shona Holmes, the Canadian patient currently appearing in a national ad on health care in the U.S., shot back: “The only partnership we have is a place for desperate Canadians to run.”
I spoke with Shona and asked her for her reaction to Mr. Layton’s visit and speech.
Shona remarked, “I am both shocked and appalled after reading the recent speech that Mr. Jack Layton gave in Washington. It is one thing to use a position of authority to win over votes in election time, but to use an opportunity to address another country about something so important as the future of their health care, and to fill that speech with untruths and misguided statements, is an embarrassment to me as a Canadian.”
Shona didn’t stop there. She has some hard-hitting questions for Mr. Layton:
“Mr. Layton, how you can possibly say there are no wait times, when our government runs a website which is only a recent development, to help our citizens work through the maze of getting treatment? Why are our babies being sent over the border to be born? Why in one month alone, did we need to send 36 patients over the border for government approved brain surgery? Why is the government paying for, in full, the procedure of Gastric Bypass surgery and sending those patients to the U.S. daily for this surgery because we don't have enough doctors here in Canada to help them? In your own words, you say, that the majority of Canadians are "satisfied" with our health care, were those 5 million Canadians that you talk about without a Family Doctor polled? And my last question, if you really are interested in making a difference, why are you not ashamed about my situation, and doing something here at home to make this right?”
Something tells me Mr. Layton won’t make answering these questions a priority. He’s busy at the moment working to encourage our politicians to foist a government-controlled healthcare system on all Americans.
It’s worth mentioning that Mr. Layton availed himself of a private clinic in the 90’s when he needed hernia surgery. No wait list for him.
