In a rather strange and rambling column in which Maureen Dowd manages to attack Robert Gibbs, the “lefties” and Obama all at the same time there is a single nugget of truth or near truth where she quotes Gibbs recent outburst against the adminsitration’s critics:

He said the president’s lefty critics “ought to be drug-tested,” would only “be satisfied when we have Canadian health care …

Now I don’t know about the drug testing part, but the rest is mostly true at least from my perspective. Having recently visited a friend in Canada with a severe chronic illness I was struck by the differences between the health care system in America, even as reformed, and the Canadian single payer system.

As I’ve written about before, I have a chronic auto-immune disorder which has caused me innumerable difficulties in obtaining permission to see specialists, obtain the latest medications and, if granted permission to receive them afford my portion of their cost.

This is not the case in Canada which does have a true single payer system and which, by the way, ranks higher than the United states an any number of measures of overall health. My friend sees her doctor whenever she wishes and receives new medicines when they are still under patent. Indeed that fact alone has made a big difference in her day to day life since she was given a newer, more expensive, but much more effective medication for her condition without any bureaucrat coming between her and her doctor’s decision.

Yes, sometimes she has waits for specialists, but so do I under the US health care system and based on what she told me the waits are comparable to mine or less. And I am forced to take out of date treatments for my condition because those medications are now off patent and generic. My medications were first used in the 60’s and often have extremely negative side effects, while she has access to the latest treatments.

Who in their right mind, not just “lefties,” would prefer a system that doesn’t insert its own judgment as to medical treatment for that of the doctor and patient? Heck, most Americans were in favor of a “public option” to compete with the private sector monopolists and I don’t believe we can call the majority of Americans leftists.

When I told my friend what we paid in medical costs last year between insurance premiums and co-pays (roughly $20,000 — in addition to my troubles, my wife is a pancreatic cancer survivor with severe after effects from her treatment for that including brain trauma and Type 1 Diabetes) she and her husband were flabbergasted. Their medical costs are microscopic in proportion to ours and mostly involve transportation to and from the doctor.

So my question to Maureen Dowd and Robert Gibbs is why is a “single payer” health care system a dirty word (for that is how Gibbs intended to use it in his attacks on the administration’s critics from the left)? Because “lefties” want it? Ask any Canadian if they would prefer changing their system to one like ours. Whether they consider themselves left, right or middle politically, I’d bet the vast majority would say No! emphatically.

Hell, my primary care physician laughs when I mention the US health care reform legislation because in his eyes it does far too little to really cut costs or change the system. And he is no leftist.

Yet here in America with a Democratic President and majorities in both houses of Congress we cannot get even a public option. Now to be fair this is not entirely the fault of the President. It is a systemic flaw in the way we finance our campaigns and allow corporations to overwhelm the system with lobbyists, many of whom were former politicians or served on their staffs, and flood the airwaves with ads attacking common sense solutions that will cut into their bottom line.

But to for a high Democratic administration official to criticize a progressive policy idea as somehow being “dirty” or “ridiculous” is absurd. And for Gibbs and Dowd to both agree with the negative connotations given to that term (“Canadian health care” or “single payer” — take your pick) shows how far our political discourse has fallen, how detached from even suggesting government can be a primary force to solve critical human problems such as public health and how insane we must appear as a country to every other western developed nation who provides better health care to their citizens.