Birthers and Death Panels Are Pissing Me Off

Lately I've been extremely angry about the continued claims that Obama wasn't born in Hawaii and that any of the proposed health care reform bills contain the concept of "death panels". I stopped to ask myself why these particular idiocies should be aggravating me more than ones in the past and believe I have the answer: because they are so demonstrably ridiculous. Anyone with even a modicum of intellectually ability or honesty can rule them both out definitively in the space of about ten minutes. That leaves me with the inescapable conclusion that people pushing these views are either too stupid and arrogant to realize they are hopelessly incompetent and should keep their mouths shut, or are intentionally trying to spread misinformation to stop any potential improvement in our mediocre social systems. Both of those possibilities are worth getting angry about.

It May Not Be Perfect, But Canada's Health Care System is Better Than Ours

One fallacious argument I hear time and again with regards to the inferiority of Canada's health system is that they have long waiting periods for many services. While true, this ignores the fact that overall Canada has a better quality of health, which puts such waiting times into proper context. It's the logical equivalent of an advertisement that touts a single aspect of their product as superior, but ignores all the others. Even worse such a stilted view completely glosses over that they spend so much less per capita on health care than we do (10% vs 17% of GDP and their GDP per person is about 17% less than ours, making our per capita expenditure roughly twice as much). If we adopted their system, funded to our levels, it would blow the doors off our current health care standards. This means their methods are superior to ours, but does not mean we can't explore alternatives. Since almost all modern nations beat the tar out of us on health care there are a lot of sources for inspiration.