Knocking Natasha And Lambasting 'Canuck-Care'

I read something particularly ridiculous in the Bucks County Courier Times this morning, and I wanted to take a few minutes to respond; I should emphasize, though, that the paper was merely reprinting this story from another source.

It seems that a physician named Cory Franklin wrote a column trying to explain how Canadian health care (as opposed to the wonderful, American for-profit system) was responsible for the tragic death of actress Natasha Richardson last week…

Richardson died of an epidural hematoma, a bleeding artery between the skull and brain that compresses and ultimately causes fatal brain damage via pressure buildup. With prompt diagnosis by CT scan, and surgery to drain the blood, most patients survive. Could Richardson have received this care? Where it happened in Canada, no. In many American resorts, yes.

That’s one of the most ridiculous lies that I’ve ever read; to the great credit of The Nation’s Betsy Reed, she wrote as follows (here)…

Franklin, it turns out, is either guilty of deception or shockingly shoddy journalism, or some combination of both. A phone call from The Nation to the Centre Hospitalier Laurentien in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts elicited some interesting information. The hospital has a CT scanner. Its director of communications would not, out of understandable deference to the family's wishes to protect her medical privacy, divulge whether or not Richardson received a scan. But there's no reason to believe that she did not.

Trust me; I have it on good information that a CAT scan is a universally accepted protocol for head trauma (Mrs. Doomsy is a nurse, just for the record).

And while I don’t know if Franklin is trying to influence the debate on heath care in this country by writing this dreck, it really wouldn’t be much of a stretch to assume that he was, wouldn’t it?

With that in mind, I should note that I finally saw “Sicko” a few weeks ago when I was laid up (I thought this was a good critique), and while those who instinctively convulse at the mere mention of Michael Moore will despise it no matter what you or I say, I should note that I thought it was a pretty thorough examination of the state of health care in this country, and it shed some interesting insights into how other countries provide this service (here is an opposition point of view by Kurt Loder – as always with Moore, I think what he has to say should be the beginning of the informed debate on the issues he makes movies about, not necessarily the middle and the end too).

And that is particularly true when the side seeking to preserve the status quo can rally around the type of outrageous propaganda foisted on us by Dr. Franklin, as noted previously.