Bullshit!

I've had two surgeries performed recently (within the past ten years). One to remove a tumor from my chest (suspected male breast cancer) and another to remove a suspect mole from, ahem... a sensitive place.

Both were done in timely fashion. Within ten days of referral by my personal physician to a surgeon, I was on the table and I had the results from the lab before I was given my release from the hospital.

Just three months ago I popped a tendon in my hand (thumb forefinger) and an infection developed. I was given outpatient intravenous anti-biotic treatments with a new wick to draw off the infection each 24 hours. I had a standing appointment at the hospital each evening during this procedure and, although it was sometimes painful to endure, the doctors and nurses who attended me were pros and the experience refreshed my faith in human nature and the system.

I could tell a similar story of the way my mother was treated after having two knee replacements and much later during and following a heart attack. She had extensive physiotherapy after the first two incidents and wonderful psychotherapy dealing with the depression that comes after heart failure in the second.

She died many years later, but c'est la vie.

Or I could talk about my dad who lay semi-comatose for three years in Ste. Anne de Bellevue Veterans Hospital, one of the best facilities in the world for people who have served. Kilted pipers walked the wards on weekends and my father cried as did I.

A good thing about socialized medicine is that the rich will think that they will die sooner and suffer more because they will be treated like the rest of us.