Left Oblique

Monday, March 8, 2010

Sarah Palin used to go to Canada for health care.

The Calgary Herald is reporting that Palin's parents used to take her across the border for that horrible "socialized medicine" then have in Canuckistan:

"... we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse. I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada."

Note that Whitehorse is in the Yukon Territory, about a 3-4 hour drive from Skagway. Juneau is about a 4.5 hour trip, but requires taking a ferry, which might not be running right when you have a medical emergency. So even if one had a moral objection to socialized health care (or to freeloading on another country's publicly-financed system!) it doesn't seem unreasonable for a Skagway resident to travel to Canada for acute care.

That is, if they were traveling by car.¹

¹ Or were even able to; there appears to be a small road connecting Skagway to the border, but it's through a national park and Google Maps won't use it to cross - and that's in 2010.

But Palin specifically said that they put the kid on a train, which means that they were at the mercy of whatever the train schedule was. I can only assume that passenger trains didn't come all that more often than ferries to Juneau.² And in the past, Palin has said that her family used health services in Juneau as well.

² Which are, incidentally, run by the government and considered part of the state highway system. So, like most public transportation, they probably run more often and for lower fares than you'd expect from a private, for-profit service.

If good old American fee-for-service health care in Juneau was so much better than wait-in-line-forever commie health care in Canada, why would the Palin family have used both at their convenience? Why wouldn't they have waited a few extra hours to use the far-superior American product? Unless... unless of course the Canadian product wasn't really all that bad (likely), or was a lot cheaper (also likely), or was even maybe a bit better, especially in remote places like Alaska or the Yukon, since a government-backed system is likely to provide better incentives for doctors to practice in under-served areas than a marked-based one (again, quite likely).

Odds are, we'll never get a straight answer about this from Palin, so we only have what she told the Canadians to go on. But these real-world experiences of working-class people are the the sort of comparisons we need to be making if we're going to evaluate how American health care and coverage stack up to other countries'.³

³ Also note that Canada is a bad example - they have one of the worst, least-efficient universal health systems of any major industrialized country. They do have better health outcomes than the U.S., mind you, but not as much better as most European countries, Japan, etc.

Posted by Dave at 12:27 PM

Comments

Craig

Palin being a hypocrite? That ranks somewhere just below "eye roll and sarcastic comment" on my "Not surprised-o-meter." And yet, I'm sure her followers will claim this is all some conspiracy to paint her in a bad light.

Posted on Monday, March 8, 2010 at 6:57 PM