I'm sick of this myth that people in other countries hate free health care

[Lydia Leftcoast]

29. Well I can play "anecdotal evidence" too

When I was in England in 2007, I asked people about their health care.

The landlady in one of the B&B's told of going for her annual checkup and having her GP tell her that he suspected cancer. (She didn't say where. She was kind of old-fashioned, so it may have been some place an old-fashioned landlady wouldn't want to talk about.) He sent her to an oncologist (she got in two days later) who confirmed that she did have cancer. She had surgery and chemo without paying a cent.

Having heard all the horror stories about long waits, I asked her how long it was from the oncologist's diagnosis to her surgery.

"Two weeks," she said.

Right-wingers like to cite higher cure rates for breast and prostate cancer in the U.S. than in the U.K.

One reason is that the U.S. tends to aggressively treat breast and prostate tumors that grow so slowly that the person would probably die of old age before the cancer affected them in any way. This counts as a "cure," when it wouldn't have killed the person anyway.

If you compare fast-growing tumors, the U.S. and U.K. survival rates are quite similar.