Doug - Yes, the Canadian government would have paid the whole million dollar tab for your wife's medical care. Now ask yourself how any decent society can have a system that charges a sick person a million dollars in the first place! That is criminal.

In ancient China the doctor earned his living by keeping his townspeople from getting sick in the first place. If the community stayed healthy, he earned the rewards. If people got sick, it was his sworn duty to heal them (if possible) and at NO CHARGE...not an opportunity to CASH IN!!!

Public health should never be charged for, any more than you would charge your own child 5 bucks before consenting to stick a bandaid on his hurt knee! The utter evil of a system that charges sick people money to heal them simply confounds me. It will one day be seen the way we now see the Dark Ages or the Spanish Inquisition.

It is equivalent to your own military refusing to defend your town, state, or country against a foreign invasion, unless every citizen forks over 50% of all the money in his bank account first, and puts in in the commanding general's hand!

It's sick, it's corrupt, it's evil.

As for the Berlin Wall...Yes, it should have come down...AND THEN the West should have kept its promises about what would supposedly happen afterward...the West did not keep its promises.

As McGrath said: "it wasn't allowed to happen. For the people in power in the West, especially in the United States and in the United Kingdom the worst nightmare would have been to see some kind of "socialism with a human face" offered as a real option to the peoples of Middle and Eastern Europe. They wanted to make deals with the crooks who had been running things so that together they could cream off the loot, and stop any of that kind of nonsense."

Same thing in Russia and most of the rest of the Eastern bloc. The crooks, mafia, and carpetbaggers have creamed off the loot. They were promised democracy...the BIG LIE...they were given corruption and social disaster. All those people were betrayed. What Gorbachev tried to do (socialism with a human face) was betrayed by the West, even as they praised him for so doing.

That's precisely what will happen to Cuba, once the barriers come down. In Cuba, $300 US is an excellent annual salary, providing a nice life. Can you imagine what will happen when Mr. Mafioso or Mr. Esso or Mr. McDonalds walks in with millions and millions of dollars in his hand? He will hire the thugs, the bully boys, the most ruthless and vicious people he can find, those who have no conscience and no allegiance to any higher ideal...and he will take over. He will exploit the shit out of the place. The poor will huddle in shantytowns. Their daughters (if attractive enough) will become fodder for the porn industry and the bordello. There will be plenty of cops on the street, and they will be NEEDED. There will be violence and despair. The mansions will once again have millionaires living in them, with plenty of armed guards, and the nicer beaches will be closed off to the ordinary public which now has free access.

Doug, I've told you before, you are living in Imperial Rome. I don't blame you for being a patriotic Roman, because that's what you are familiar with, but I don't believe you realize what Rome does out there in the hinterlands.

Remember Hadrian's wall? The Britons on the north side of it were poorer (materially speaking) than the Romans, but at least they were free. Tens of thousands of them died to preserve that freedom. When the Romans left, no one mourned.

- LH