A perusal of the PDF file available for download at the link above - remember, this is the same study Dr. Gupta used - reveals the following:
-Roughly one-half of patients in the top four countries featured in the study are able to get same-day appointments when sick, compared to only 30% of U..S. patients and 23% of Canadian patients. In other words, the degree by which the U.S. bests Canada in this figure is much smaller than the degree by which it falls behind any of the other four.
-U.S. patients had the highest rate of difficulty in getting care on holidays and weekends without going to an emergency room. Not surprisingly, the U.S. also had the highest rate of emergency-room use for conditions that could have been treated by a regular doctor.
-While the U.S. and Germany were the only two countries in which more than half of all patients could see a specialist within one month, Australia was a close 3rd at 48%. In four of the six countries, 80% or more of all patients were able to see a specialist within 4 months.
-The U.S has the largest percentage of people (16%) without a regular doctor. The next-highest percentage was only 8%, shared by Canada and Australia.
-The U.S. had the highest number of “coordination problems” with doctors - including duplicate tests and test data unavailable at the time it was needed.
None of this makes in into Dr. Gupta’s fair and balanced “fact-check”, of course - only the victory-dance about being number two to Germany, and the out-of-context comparison to Canadian wait-times (which, while it may speak ill of Canada’s system, clearly does not refute the success of socialized medicine in general).
Now cut to the whopper - testimony from pro-Bush minion Dr. Paul Keckley to the following effect. This is truly mind-blowing:
“That’s the reality of those systems. There are quotas, there are planned wait times, the concept is that care is free in France and Canada and Cuba, and it’s not. Those citizens pay for health services out of taxes, and as a proportion of their household income, it’s a significant number.”
Let’s review and reflect. Even though Dr. Gupta is fully aware - because he read the report - that the U.S. lags behind the other five countries in this study in just about every conceivable aspect of patient access, and even though he came right out and said himself that the U.S. is behind these other four countries which have universal coverage (though, importantly, he doesn’t say just how far behind), he still puts up this stink pile of a quote from a Bush-ite corporate lackey, for his “expert” testimony that patients in these other countries suffer under the unpleasant burdens of quotas and planned wait times. Dr. Gupta has performed the ultimate spin trick - one that is used in the mainstream media every day, so we should know how to spot it - of telling a little piece of the truth and then deliberately negating it from the viewers’ memory by following it with a contradictory statement that appears to not contradict it. It’s a kind of sequential elision. This trick been studied by psychologists and practiced by propagandists for decades, and it exploits a well-known weakness in human short-term memory. Observe this sequence:
Canada has a longer wait-time than the U.S…Canada has socialized medicine…socialized medicine involves quotas and wait-periods…. obvious implication: socialized medicine will increase your wait-time. The fact that four other countries with socialized medicine bested the U.S. - which Dr. Gupta deliberately refrains from stating to make this tactic more effective (the viewer must infer it on the spot from the statement “only Canada was worse than the U.S.”) is now completely erased from the narrative.
And now onto the dreaded high taxes.
Immediately following Dr. Keckley’s testimony, we resume with Dr. Gupta’s narration:
“It’s true that the French pay higher taxes, and so does nearly every country ahead of the U.S. on that list. But even higher taxes don’t give all the coverage everyone wants.”
And return to Keckley:
“15 to 20% of the population will purchase services outside of the system of care run by the government.”
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