Shocker: Media Lies About Rand Paul’s Canadian Hernia Surgery

Flickr/Creative Commons/Gage Skidmore http://bit.ly/2yoswBP

The fake news media is up to its normal tricks, this time lying about Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s upcoming hernia surgery, which he will receive at a privately-owned hospital in Canada.

“Rand Paul Heading To Canada, Land Of Universal Health Care, For Surgery,” said a Monday HuffPost headline.

“Free Market Boner Rand Paul Is Getting Hernia Surgery in Canada,” said Splinter. 

“Rand Paul, Who Calls Universal Healthcare ‘Slavery,’ Will Have Surgery in Canada But Insists Hospital is Private,” said a Newsweek headline.

You get the point. Canada has universal healthcare. Paul rails against universal healthcare regularly. Thus, the leftist press is stretching Paul’s Canadian surgery into some sort of hypocritical endorsement of socialized medicine.

But the facts remain. Paul will receive surgery at the Shouldice Hernia Hospital in Ontario, which is described as a “world renowned” hospital for such care. It is also one of the only privately owned hospitals in Canada

“Founded in 1945 by Dr. Earl Shouldice, the private, for-profit hospital has been offering the finest in hernia care to not only Ontarians but also to patients from all over the globe,” said a London, Ontario newspaper in 2012.

According to the Canadian Women’s Health Network,  95 percent of Canadian hospitals are run by the Canadian government.

Shouldice is not run by the Canadian government, which is perhaps why the services there are “world renowned.” There aren’t many Americans fleeing to Canada for quality healthcare. In fact, it is often the opposite. There is a trend in the Canadian healthcare system of patients suing the government to receive treatments that are not covered by their “universal healthcare” system, but are covered under standard insurance plans in the United States’ mixed publicly/privately run healthcare system.

A Canadian doctor and senior fellow at both the Manhattan Institute and the Montreal Economic Institute discusses the horrific details of Canada’s socialized medicine here. Dr. David Gratzer wrote:

My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.

Gratzer also wrote a book on the subject, which the fake news media has apparently not read.

So, according to Gatzner, Paul’s hernia surgery under universal healthcare in Canada at a public hospital would put him on a three-year waitlist. At privately owned Shouldice, he will receive the surgery on Jan. 21. Paul will pay $8,000 out of pocket, in cash.

“This is more fake news on a story that has been terribly reported from day one,” Paul spokeswoman Kelsey Cooper reportedly told the media. “This is a private, world renowned hospital separate from any system, and people come from around the world to pay cash for their services.”

Predictably, the press downplayed the cause of Paul’s injury in the first place – his crazed leftist neighbor brutally attacking him out of nowhere. The media described the motive for the attack as a “lawn care dispute.” Boucher did 30 days in jail for the attack.

In the optics department, Paul gets an F for his choice in healthcare provider. He had to see these headlines coming. But that is no excuse for the lying fake news media to, well, lie.

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