Lobbyists, McGrath. Lobbyists are professional people paid to represent private industry and influence legislators, and they are paid VERY well. It's their fulltime job. They siphon money to legislators, and arrange all kinds of contracts and perks, and they apply pressure to get legislation passed that will benefit the private industries who have employed the lobbyists, but NOT the general public. They are THE signficant factor in steering legislation in the US Congress, in the various state legislatures, and no doubt in the Canadian government as well, because they represent the most powerful financial entities in the society. The voice of the public is not much compared to the voice of the corporate lobbyists in Washington. The public is too distracted, too divided, and too busy with their ordinary lives....but the lobbyist has a fulltime job to bribe, influence, and cajole Congressmen into doing what the big corporate players want done. And he has the MONEY to buy their votes.

So they went looking for someone, ANYONE they could find from Canada who had a personal beef of some kind about our Medicare system. Well, someone like that can always be found...it doesn't matter where you go. There's always someone who has a beef against a system. They may be only one person in 100,000 people, but you can find them.

My point is, they did not go looking for the millions of Canadians who LIKE our medicare system and support it. If they had, they could have found millions of them to testify at Congress if they had paid them for their time and trouble to do it, but they were not paid to find someone who likes our medicare system. They were paid to find someone who doesn't like it.

I'd say she represents about 1% of the people up here in Canada...but Congress won't hear that part of the story, will they? And Fox won't report it. And the Republicans will never know about it. They will see and hear only what they already wish to see and hear. Thus is the monkey kept happy inside his cage, never mindful of the bars that surround him.