Good article, Ed T.

Here's an extraordinary thing. Look at this link about comparative health care systems in developed countries: Comparative National Health Care Systems

The USA is the ONLY country on the list which does NOT have a publicly funded national health insurance program. It is also the country which spends the largest percentage of its GDP by far on health care and where its citizens can least afford to meet their health care expenses! Astounding. The chart is from 1997. Costs have gone up since then in every country, and the USA is still the country with the highest % of GDP cost of health care...and the least result for it. Something is seriously wrong in America. Your public is at the mercy of your private enterprise system which exists not to serve the public, but to line its own pockets.

We presently spend about 10% of our GDP (from taxation) on health care in Canada...and its universal and free to every citizen. The USA presently spends about 17% of its GDP (from taxation) on health care, and it's cripplingly expensive to anyone who needs treatment, but doesn't have insurance coverage from an employer. A busted ankle with complications cost Mike Huckabee's daughter about $12,000 in hospital fees over a period of one year. In Canada it would have cost her absolutely nothing in medical fees...but she still pays her taxes into that 17% of the USA GDP!

Yet Huckabee is terrified by what "socialism" could do if allowed into the USA Medicare system. He has no idea when it comes to that. (He does have some excellent ideas about various other things, but not about that. I've been reading his book, and there's some very good stuff in it, but he has no idea what socialism is at all.)

If he had been born in Canada or Europe, he'd see it very differently. The one thing the Canadian electorate WILL NOT see threatened is our national health plan, and our politicians know it.