Inspired by the Canadians and Britons on my list valiantly trying to correct the lies being spoon-fed to the American public.

This is the explanatory post, if you will.

There are a lot of lies running around out there about Health Reform in the U.S., including painting other countries' health schemes as somehow "worse" than what we have in the U.S. (which is demonstrably not true), as well as the kind of people health reform would benefit vs. harm.

There's a lot that can be said about the proposals floating around out there, some good, some bad. But we'll never reach a solution if we're screaming at each other about it.

What we need is some truth. Facts, figures, and reality on the ground.

Who are the Americans who stand to gain from health reform? And is health care and health insurance in other western democracies really nothing more than bureaucratic factories o' death?

Since this is the Age of the Internet, maybe we should just ask the people who know these things.

So, all you peeps out there in Internet-land: I'm asking you to lay it your fellow netizens. What's it really like out there in the big, wide world?

I will be collecting comments in two posts:

• Americans Only: Uninsured and Underinsured
  
  
• Countries with Government Health Schemes: Talk About Your Health Insurance/Health Care Here
  

Anonymous commenting will be allowed, open, and unscreened on these two posts only. I will not be responding to any comments, only monitoring to keep the bloodshed down to a minimum.

The idea is to share facts and figures, and to tell your story in a place where people can come and read everything for themselves.

Spread the link around far and wide. All are welcome to comment.

Comments for this post are disabled. Please go to the links above to leave your comments.

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via someone from high school who linked to me on Facebook (put up under my RL identity to screen this journal from potential snoopy-snoops):

It appears that Classmates (that online class reunion site that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole because I just fucking loved high school...) now allows partial profiles on the Internet.

Out of morbid curiosity, I checked out the list of people I went to high school with.

*boggles*

I may be a fat-ass, but at least I've aged well. (People generally guess that I'm 8 years younger than I actually am, give or take 2 years either way.)

Not only that, if I had some dude take a picture of me kayaking away and put that up on my profile, I'd look a lot healthier by a hell of a lot, too. Actually, fat-ass that I am, I'm actually in better shape than some of the pictures of my former high school classmates, especially the boys.

I call myself a fat-ass, and sure, I look like a fat-ass, but how many fat-asses do you know can row a little over 3 miles an hour? Yeah. That's what I thought. So let's call me, "Heavy, but fit."

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Edit: Today is not my day. I was reliably informed that the character was Emily Litella, not Roseanne Roseannadanna whose catch phrase was "Nevermind."

I did say these characters were before my time, right?

Corrected message begins:

I was pretty much away teh internetz all day yesterday and last night.

I was informed that Tim Hortons corporate apologized for what turned out to be a local regional manager's screw-up. (I hope the regional manager is put at least on probation for not following company policy.)

In any case, in the words of Emily Litella: Nevermind.

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