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Monday, September 7, 2009

Canadians Defend Their Health Care System In Video

By Jason Linkins
jason@huffingtonpost.com |
Huffington Post

First Posted: 09- 4-09 02:10 PM | Updated: 09- 4-09 02:35 PM

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the often confused health care reform discourse is the way so many perfectly nice health care systems that operate in some perfectly pleasant foreign nations have been caught in the crossfire. Writing on these pages, Allison Kilkenny chronicled the way British citizens defended their own National Health Service from the slings and arrows of outrageous talking points. Twitter users may remember outspoken Brits defending the NHS on messages accompanied by a #welovetheNHS hashtag.

Well, the Canadians, who use a nationally-funded single-payer system, aren't going to sit back and let American politicians slag the health care that they love, either! So, from Karoli at U.S. Health Crisis comes a video of several Canadians offering up some real talk on what health care is like in the Great White North. Guess what? They like it! And they are a wee bit vexed and perplexed by what people in America have been saying about it.



The blogger behind the video said that she tried to get some negative views and failed:

In the spirit of truth, my friend Matte Black (@Shoq on Twitter) and his brother took their video camera to Canada on vacation to interview Canadians about their health care system. When we talked about it, I asked him to try to get negative views with specifics for balance. Here is the result. It has been edited for brevity, but the negative views were not removed, because there were none. He could not find one Canadian who thought they should kill the system.
My favorite part of the video is when the Canadians are asked about their "co-pay," and they all basically stare at the camera as if they've been asked, "Prithee! Would you like to wear my peanut butter fancypants, this merry Midsummer morning?"
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