ยป Sarah Palin Has A CareCard
Sarah Palin used to border jump to Whitehorse to take advantage of our socialized medicine. So she likes free medicine, she just hates paying taxes.
Preston Manning claims that Health Care here is broken because it uses the American system as a crutch. The Conservatives probably haven’t taken into account the effect of Americans — prominent, rich, gubernatorial Americans — crutching around on our dime.
Of course, the Republispin is that this just proves that socialized medicine benefits border hoppers.
There doesn’t seem to be any indication that Palin did anything fraudulent, aside from that conclusion being jumped to by a bunch of Americans on Daily Kos with their assumptions about how “free health care” provided by the “Canadian government” works.
Having received basic health care in Ontario during the three-month waiting period as a renewed resident, I had to pay for it directly. Upon reading Palin’s remarks, it never even occurred to me that she got it without paying for it. It is possible that she received it fraudulently, but that wasn’t my assumption and nothing in her remarks seem to indicate that.
Besides, I think the real story here is her hyprocrisy – She says that “socialized medicine” is greatly inferior, it has “death panels”, and the Canadians need to switch to a for-profit private system, but then it comes out that it was perfectly good for her family to repeatedly use.
Don
8 Mar 10 at 2:17 pm
I saw the original article on dead trees and was shocked that this was just mentioned in passing. Gawker has made a bit more out of it and Huffington spins it into analysis. But as Ibbitson points out in The Globe, Whitehorse was probably the closest hospital to Skagway and Canada doesn’t charge that much for health care.
When my friend Marni first moved back to Canada from the US she was, like Don, under the waiting period. She had to spend two days in the hospital. Afterward she phoned all her friends in the States to gloat about how low the bill was.
Jared
9 Mar 10 at 11:16 am