European Free Market Conservatives Trying to Privatize Single Payer Countries. Intentional Underfunding Create Long Lines.

In an opinion article at Fox News.com, Jon Kraushar touches on the newer argument against universal health care coverage, a topic I'm sure we'll hear more about in the coming weeks.

"Single payer countries are starting to introduce private insurance because people are disatisfied with socialized medicine."

The simple answer: Conservative free market Canadians, Britians and Swedes (and elsewhere) are trying to tear down their own systems for an ideological theory that has proven itself not to work in the U.S.. Instead of investing resourses to improve their own health care plans, for profit interests are advancing privatization, just like in this country.

Here's Kraushar's upside down sell job:

Obama dismisses as "fear tactics" charges that his program amounts to "socialized medicine" similar to Canada, the United Kingdom and Sweden. Yet, ironically, Canada, the United Kingdom and Sweden are all beginning to open their socialized systems to private care due to citizen protests that critical treatments are delayed or denied. The past president of the Canadian Medical Association says that in Canada, "¦a dog can get a hip replaced in under a week but a human may wait two to three years."

Kraushar isn't telling you that conservservatives in Canada are starving health care funding, creating the supposed back logs for elective surgeries. Didn't the U.S. save money by incorporating FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security and staffing it with novices? How did that turn out? Predictably, Republicans are now using the FEMA disaster as an example of bad government, even though they destroyed what was once a competant well run department. In single payer countries, conservative elements are trying to do the same thing, thus creating the "horror stories" we hear so much about. But...

Is it not a U.S. horror story to let over 20,000 people die of curable deseases a year? Is it not a horror story to render unaffordable, health care coverage to 50 million citizens? Is it not a horror story to learn insurance companies have departments designed to find ways to deny life saving treatments for their customers.