Maybe Fox News was right about President Obama. You remember....when they said he was a socialist? When they said that he really wanted socialized medicine and not the corporate insurance based plan he promoted during the campaign? They might ahve pegged it right on.

Not that that would be a bad thing. I mean, we can certainly hope.

I haven't seen the dots connected yet, but here they are: today the President held his Health Care summit. Going into it he said that although he had proposed a plan during the campaign he wasn't married to it. All he wants is to fix the problem now. Add to that the fact that he wants the dying Ted Kennedy, a long time proponent of universal health care, to spear head the effort. But the most telling story is this one about Sanjay Gupta withdrawing his name as the new Surgeon General. Gupta, a long time opponent of a Canadian-stye single payer health care system, had drawn opposition from liberals and from some democratic congressmen who for years have been trying to expand Medicare to cover all Americans, creating a single payer system out of the one that already exists for old people. News reports say that Gupta was worried about his pay cut and wants to spend more time with his family. Right. That family line is what you say after you can somebody who's been on the job for several years, not before he's even taken the job. No, I suspect that Gupta's withdrawal, along with Obama's sudden willingness to deep-six his campaign plan, one that promised people that they wouldn't have to get up their existing health care plans if they had them, one that covered people by forcing them to buy low-cost health insurance, indicates to me that we are all going Canadian very soon.

God! We can only hope. While I have a problem with Canada's social engineering through health care--the part where they have made it illegal to purchase extra insurance so that you can get treatments earlier or from more successful specialists, all in a Utopian effort to make sure all health care is equal--nonetheless I have long advocated a single-payer system for the United States. No other system can maintain some form of competition between doctors (ensuring innovation), cover everyone, and get rid of the biggest waste of money under the currnet system, the army of "benefits experts" who exist to wade through all the existing health care plans to help people actually get health care, which should be the easiest part of getting help but is in fact a complicated Kafkaesque nightmare for most people.

So here's hoping Fox is right and we can soon Blame Canada for our good health.