Kentucky Senator Rand Paul recently announced he was receiving hernia surgery as a result of being blindsided in an attack from his neighbor. While a senator undergoing common surgery is of questionable newsworthiness, one may expect that the reminder that the Senator is still suffering from the 2017 incident as cause for sympathy. Instead, major media outlets decided to try to use the news as an example of hypocrisy on the part of Paul due to the fact he is receiving treatment at a Canadian hospital.
As published in USA Today:
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, one of the fiercest political critics of socialized medicine, will travel to Canada later this month to get hernia surgery....
He is scheduled to have the outpatient operation at the Shouldice Hernia Hospital in Thornhill, Ontario during the week of Jan. 21, according to documents from Paul's civil lawsuit against Boucher filed in Warren Circuit Court....
Paul, a Republican, often argues for private market solutions to American's health care woes.
In Canada, medical care is publicly funded and universally provided through the country's Provincial Ministry of Health, and everyone receives the same level of care.
Paul has called universal health care and nationalized options "slavery."
Of course, if the author had decided to do a two second internet search for “Shouldice Hernia Hospital,” they would have found that it is one of few private hospitals that were grandfathered in prior to the government’s takeover of Canadian healthcare.
Oops.
Of course, the same media outlets that jumped to cry "hypocrisy" at Senator Paul are also guilty of ignoring the very real consequences of Canada’s socialist healthcare system. For example, patients dying due to a lack of access to basic medical supplies such as hospital beds.
For more on the disaster of Canada's socialized healthcare system, check out this series by (Canadian author) Lee Friday:
1. The Myth They Used to Pass Canada's Universal Healthcare
2. Universal Health Care in Canada: A Colossal Government Failure
3. The Solution to Canada’s Failed Universal Health Care System: Consumer and Physician Freedom
