NY Times Column: Stop Scaring Americans about Canada's Health Care System

Comparing the experiences an American woman had being treated in the U.S. and Canada, a New York Times column today calls out opponents of health care reform for their phony claims and scare tactics.

Columnist Nicholas Kristof writes about Diane Tucker, a lawyer working in Canada, who pays the equivalent of $49 a month for health care there. When she felt numbness in her hand that turned out to be a stroke, she was met at the emergency room door by a doctor and treatment began immediately. She never received a bill.

Back in the United States, she fainted and was rushed to the hospital, where the first person she saw was an administrator who asked her how she was going to pay. The 5-hour emergency room visit cost more than $8,700.

"The bottom line is that America's health care system spends nearly twice as much per person as Canada's," Kristof wrote. "Yet our infant mortality rate is 40 percent higher than Canada's, and American mothers are 57 percent more likely to die in childbirth than Canadian ones."

Read the full column at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/opinion/11kristof.html?ref=opinion.