Phony Ads Against the Public Option

The television ads show a Canadian woman who claims to have had a brain tumor. She was told she would have to wait six months for treatment in Canada. She says that if she had waited for treatment in Canada she would have died. She mortgaged her home to pay for surgery at the Mayo Clinic in the United States. She then goes on to condemn the Canadian health care system, and implies that the Obama health care reform will lead to a Canadian style health care system. This ad is pure dishonest garbage. It is an example of the depths to which the despicable American health insurance industry is willing to stoop to try and defeat health care reform and a public option. Doesn’t is bother anybody that the whole case of the health insurance industry against health care reform has been built on lies?

The truth is that the woman, Shona Holmes, did not have a brain tumor. There was no emergency that required prompt surgery to save her life. According to the Mayo Clinic, the woman had a “Rathke's Cleft Cyst on her pituitary gland." Rathke's Cleft Cysts are not tumors; they are slow-growing benign cysts. The chair of neurosurgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., stated that such a cyst "is not typically life-threatening." Neurosurgeons in Montreal and Toronto described Holmes’ claims as exaggerated and stated that her condition was not a medical emergency. She certainly could have waited six months to have the cyst removed. I do not know why she came to the U.S. for treatment or if she was paid to make the fraudulent commercial.

People throughout Canada are outraged by this phony commercial criticizing Canadian health care. The Toronto Star published a letter to the editor from an Ontario resident who had a real brain tumor and who described the care she received in the Canadian health care system as being of "exceptional quality." Her letter concluded with the comment: "I know our health care system works and if Holmes didn't have a problem with her physician what exactly are her motives for taking part in this media spectacle?"

Aside from being untruthful and misleading, the commercial by Shona Holmes is irrelevant. President Obama’s health care reform plan does not envision a Canadian health care system. While many of us would prefer a single-payer system such as they have in Canada, that is not what the President and the Democrats in Congress are offering. They are proposing a plan which, along with a number of major reforms in the current system, offers a governmental form of health insurance as just one option among many. There will still be plenty of private insurance plans to choose from. If the public option drives private insurance options out of business, it will be because they have failed to offer something better.

One of the most disgusting things about the effort by the health insurance industry to defeat health care reform is their constant false claim that health care in Canada is slow, inefficient, and ineffective. In fact, health care in Canada is outstanding, and the people of Canada are very pleased with it. It is significantly better than health care in The United States.

A recent Canadian Press Harris-Decima Survey shows that 82 percent of Canadians are quite pleased with their health care and believe that their system is far better than American health care. The same is true of European countries with universal health care. According to an August 2009 Gallup Survey, 79 percent of people in European countries with universal health care are very satisfied with their high quality health care. The claim that Europeans are dissatisfied with their systems because of long waits for treatment is a lot of baloney.