(ThyBlackMan.com) Forget Ilhan Omar. I’d like to send Bernie Sanders back to the country from which he came, Canada. No, he wasn’t from Canada originally, but he was there recently. Does that count? After all, he is so in love with that country’s health-care system. Can we simply deport him?
It wouldn’t cost that much to send him packing. Montreal, Canada, is only a short 96 miles from his home in Burlington, Vermont. No doubt the irascible senator and Democratic presidential candidate has been there many times. Why, he is so enamored with the place that he recently took a busload of people from Detroit to Windsor, Canada, as a campaign stunt, so, please, can we just send him back to Canada, permanently?
Does that make me a racist? No, forgive me. What was I thinking? According to the left’s lexicon, you are now deemed a racist only if you criticize the political views of women or minorities. That means old white guys are fair game. Whew!
President Trump recently was called a racist for daring to point out that the city of Baltimore is a disgrace. Sanders did the exact same thing while running for president in 2015. Guess that makes him a racist too, so I’m safe.
I suspect if we could deport Bernie to Canada, it wouldn’t be long before he would be sneaking back across the border into the United States for his health care like many Canadians. A study by the Fraser Institute discovered that, in 2016, approximately 63,000 Canadians traveled to other countries to get the care they needed, and that was up some 40 percent from the year before.
In fact, some of Canada’s leading political figures have been caught sneaking across the border for health care. Most notably, former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.
Why would they do that if they could get such wonderful care for free in Canada?
A closer look reveals that about all the Canadian government guarantees you is a spot in line. If you visit a general practitioner and discover you have a problem, one that can be painful or life-threatening, you can expect to wait another five months to see a specialist and receive the necessary medical treatment. In New Brunswick, the expected wait is now up to 45 weeks. That’s over 10 months!
Even cardiac patients who need a bypass surgery that is deemed “urgent” can expect to wait another six weeks for the procedure, if they live that long.
We are told that if we just let the government control our health care it will bring the cost down. Not so. The average Canadian family paid over $39,000 in taxes last year, or more than 44 percent of its income. That was more than it spent for the bare necessities: housing, food and clothing combined. The share of the tax to cover health care for a family of four is about $13,000. The average amount of money a family of four in the U.S. spends on health care is $8,200.
Even with these high taxes, almost three-fourths of Canadians still have private insurance to cover things the government does not, such as ambulances, prescription drugs, podiatry, chiropractic, dental, etc.
The high cost of the government-run health care system in Canada is just the tip of the iceberg. What about the hours lost at work because those waiting for treatment cannot do their jobs? It is estimated to be over $2 billion for the over a million people waiting in line at any one time. If you add in their waking hours living at a reduced capacity, it amounts to about $6.3 billion. That doesn’t include the amount of time others spend caring for them at home.
Dr. Brian Day, an orthopedic surgeon who was president of the Canadian Medical Association and an advocate for patient choice, famously quipped, “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two-to-three years.” The response for the Canadian Health Coalition was telling. It had to admit “(A)ccess to veterinary care for animals is based on ability to pay.” Ahhhh!
This begs the question: Do we really want to give the money we set aside for health care to the government and let it decide when and where we go for medical treatment? I think not!
It is little wonder that Vermont, Sanders’ home state, abandoned its experiment with single-payer in 2014 due to taxation sticker-shock.
I won’t be voting for Sanders, but I’ll buy him a one-way bus ticket north.
Written by Jane Chastain
Official website; http://twitter.com/janechastain
