Canadian Health Care: Republicrook Scare Tactics.

When the siege of Sarajevo began in 1992, my father in law, an ethnic Serb, was conscripted to dig trenches for the defense of the city. His name is Nenad, a scrappy, tough as nails guy, an orphan with a tough upbringing. Divorced from my mother-in-law at the start of the war, he had just married a Muslim woman. A proud man, often to a fault, he quotes Balkan and European history with encyclopedic accuracy, a daunting and infuriating trait in arguments. Neither were particularly politically active, and bore far greater love for their cosmopolitan city than their respective religions.

Nenad suffered from a severe kidney disease that required regular dialysis treatments to keep him alive. As the Serbian noose tightened around Sarajevo and electricity was cut off, even to the hospitals Nenad's health became more precarious. Conscripted and forced to dig trenches under fire Nenad collapsed and was rushed to Kosevo hospital, where he might have died. Through contacts in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, his wife managed to have him evacuated.

In Belgrade the couple quickly applied for refugee status and then immigrated to Canada. Even as a refugee Canada found clean, safe and adequate public housing in Kitchner/Waterloo Ontario. even more, Nenad had the privilege of excellent medical care at a local clinic. So much that he began to think of the health care workers at the clinic where he went for regular dialysis as a second family, all of it for free. Well, perhaps not for free, but paid for by a community that understood shared sacrifice for the neediest among them, and who understood that everyone at sometime must rely on the benevolence of the community.

Public assistance and disability was adequate to keep the family, now with a new baby girl, above the poverty line. Nenad was put on a donor wait list for a new Kidney.Two years later, less than the average wait time in the US, he received a new kidney. The family has since moved to a small but comfortable publicly financed townhouse. Unable to work, and still suffering effects of the war and the disease, it is a blessing that has afforded Nenad, his family, and many needy or disabled Canadians a decent and respectable quality of life. The doctors and professionals that treated him gave exemplary and friendly care, despite the so-called "socialist" system Hannity, Limbaugh and others on the Right lie about being broken and inefficient. In the US Nenad would had to leverage his life and daughters future on the speculation that a kidney would become available.

In the US the number one reason for declaring bankruptcy is not overspending an abuse of credit cards, or a lack of responsibility, as the Republicrook spokes mouth for big business and credit card companies would have you believe. It is for catastrophic illness and injury, particularly among the uninsured. I know, in this I got mine, you get yours country, an era Reagan, big business and the Republican ushered in (we were once a nation that at least attempted to care for one another) will coldly dismiss all this as whining, and handouts for losers. That, I suppose is the curse of your own soul, and the rest of us, who still believe in that better more caring America pray if disaster finds your life you reach out to us and not to one of your own kind.