You know, truth has been in short supply in the American “debate” over health care reform.  Today now everyone is quoting the outgoing and incoming presidents of the Canadian Medical Association using the word “implode” to describe our system.

So here is my last input to the American debate, as if facts and truth matter.  Read the speeches of the CMA Presidents.  It is true that they are shilling for more private care, to make more money, have more opportunity and maybe some of them even believe that patients will be better served by choice.

But nowhere do they say anything about abandoning universal care.  In her inaugural address this week, the new president, Dr. Annie Doig, said this:

Canada’s physicians have always stood four-square behind the principle that no Canadian should do without needed medical care because of an inability to pay. That is an irrefutable fact. Canada’s physicians also stand four-square behind the principle that all Canadians must have appropriate access to the care they need. That, too, is an irrefutable fact.

Even the outgoing president who took a pretty hardline in favour of more private care  said this:

Start by building a patient-centred culture that ensures that the patient has unfettered access, with no financial barrier, to continuity of care dispensed at the right time. In concrete terms, this means that when the patient arrives at the hospital, doctor’s office or other facility, he or she is seen quickly. And it means that when a patient requires surgery, he or she receives it within an acceptable timeframe.

In the United States right now people are actually debating this point. We might have differing opinions on this, and radically different ways of getting the job done, but no serious leader in Canada would question equal and fair access of all patients to the care they need, regardless of their ability to pay.  That is universal health care.  It means that people get cared for, and not that 10s of millions of people don’t ever get care because they are afraid that they can’t afford it.

So, understand this.  In Canada the debate is about coping with rising costs, making services more efficient and ensuring that everyone gets the care tey need.  It is not about fundamental access.  It is a debate that is alive in every country in the world.  But it is not the same debate as the one going on in the States right now.  And using single words like “implode” from a rhetorical speech that actually supports improving universal health care to oppose Obama’s plan is like quoting Einstein in a divorce settlement: sure you’re both talking about “relativity” but the similarity ends there.

Good luck my American friends.  I hope the level of discourse returns from its dive into the ridculous soon.  And I hope no one gets hurt before it does.

Cleaning my plate:

• Bella Gaia, a poetic view of earth from space.
• Donella Meadows‘ classic piece on places to intervene in a system.
• Nancy White on her software and web apps set up.
• True North Records has a great podcast of contemporary Canadian singer/songwriters.
• Common Dreams reports on Starbucks’ intention to fool us all.
• Beware of the Blog posts something funny and absurd.
• Ria Baeck tweets a Bodhisattva on the subway.

I have updated my music pages and finally migrated them here.  Go visit if you want to learn about my musical history, watch some videos  and listen to a few tracks and sound samples from my musical career.

Goodness that came my way this past week:

• Norma Flores, a participant on our Food and Society Conference core team this year, has a blog about her work for farmworker justice.
• Brad Ovenell-Carter and the void of voids.
• Dave Pollard shares a travelouge from Joanna Macy in the Tar Sands
• Also from Dave, The Transition Initiative.
• Dojo Rat on his practice over the next 50 years.

This story about Britain’s last WW1 soldier has a key them:   reconciliation is possible:

To the strains of the “Last Post,” and in the presence of soldiers from armies that had fought as both friend and foe, the funeral was held here Thursday for Harry Patch, the last British survivor of World War I living in this country.

Pallbearers carried the coffin of Harry Patch from Wells Cathedral on Thursday in Wells, England.

Born in June 1898, Mr. Patch died last month at the age of 111 at a nursing home in this southwestern cathedral city, where thousands of people lined the streets in densely-packed rows and applauded as his coffin passed by, draped in the red, white and blue Union flag.

Soldiers from Britain, Belgium, France and Germany marched alongside the coffin in a token of Mr. Patch’s increasing desire as he aged for reconciliation both with his own memories of the trenches and with his erstwhile enemies.

“Too many died,” he said, late in life, of the estimated 900,000 Britons killed in the conflict. “War isn’t worth one life.” He called war “the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,”

To have soldiers of the former enemy marching at his funeral!   Imagine Afghanis marching at the funeral of Canadian veterans in 80 years.   And vice versa.

That is the world we certainly would wish for, no?   And what if we were to work back from that premise to the near future?   What does it say about how we will end this endless debacle?