Read on to see the facts:
According to the very non-partisan Business Week:

--Wait time to see a dermatologist to examine that suspicious (cancerous?) mole: 38 days, but 78 days if you live in Boston

--Time to see an orthopedic surgeon for that painful, inflamed knee: 43 days in Los Angeles, 17 days in general

--26% of adults, 1 out of 4, went to an emergency room just because the wait times in the U.S. are unmanageable.

--Only 47% of U.S. patients could get same or even next day appointments. In all fairness that percentage is better than Canada's but worse then every single other country in the survey!

--We were 2nd out of 6 nations on getting a hip replacement or other specialists quickly, but Germany was 1st and they have universal single payer. This proves that a single payer nation can be more efficient than us. We can do things as well as Germany, can't we?

--We led the other 6 nations by a huge margin in one category. 51% of Americans never visited a doctor. received any medical care, or got any prescriptions for a whole year because of cost.

--According to the reputable New England Journal of Medicine we wait 2 weeks for a knee consultation and the Canadians wait 4 weeks, but the satisfaction conclusion after the final surgery is key:

Conclusions Waiting times for initial orthopedic consultation and for knee-replacement surgery were longer in Ontario than in the United States, but overall satisfaction with surgery was similar."

How about all those Canadians flocking across the border to avoid wait times? Well, they did a study of hospitals in Michigan, New York, and Washington that bordered major Canadian provinces. You can read about it in this primer

During this period, these
hospitalizations represented only 0.23% of all the hospitalizations that occurred in the
three provinces bordering these states.

Two last items. It is hard to get an extensive handle on U.S. wait times because of the disjointed market there is no reporting. I have cited reputable, rigorous studies that were done with incredible thoroughness. In Canada wait times are all collected and made public.

And finally, our wait times for specialists might be low, but that only applies to the insured. For millions upon millions of Americans wait times for a hip replacement, for example are infinite.

Fox News already has their Franken talking points
Never to be confused with a real outlet of journalism, Fox News already has their talking points in place with regard to Al Franken: emphasize his "high unfavorables." Of course, the poll they cite, duly repeated by Politico, was a national poll, which often doesn't turn out well for congressional leaders.

Can someone remind me of the last time we were supposed to care about a national poll about a junior Senator who hasn't even been sworn in for his first term yet? Or better yet, when was the last time a poll like that actually mattered?

Still, good to see Fox News is on the ball with their attack strategy.


Breaking Trends
Two trends are really changing the way politics will happen in next couple of years. Video is now the language of communication. Now "talking back" is even done in video, as this sample video shows.

This effect counters the endless-repeat lies done by mainstream media. In fact, "getting it" and knowing the lies is a major factor in the youth universe. One of the political cartoons was making a joke about seeing two shadows. A very smart teenager asked me why that was supposed to be funny. I told her that the famous man-on-the-moon photo has two shadows when there was only one light source. A single light source can only create a single shadow, so many people believe that landing on the moon was faked. She was thoughtful and not at all fazed by the idea that a common belief could be totally wrong. I think she could go places in myth busting that I have not imagined. The point of all of this, is that one has to be able to consider the possibility to investigate, which I find that older people are unable to do, while young people do consider possibilities with ease.

 


WashIndy: Governor Coleman! (?)
Dave Weigel, who covers the conservative movement for the Washington Independent, isn't convinced of Norm's alleged appeal in the 2010 gubernatorial race:

Coleman is not that popular. He's run for statewide office three times, losing twice, and winning only after his opponent, the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), died in a plane crash and was replaced on the ballot by former Vice President Walter Mondale. Coleman's clever and delicate 11th-hour campaign against Mondale was impressive, but it still only netted him 49.5 percent of the vote in a very good Republican year. The last Minnesota poll, conducted in April by the Star-Tribune, gave him a 17-point net negative favorable rating. And for much of 2007 and 2008, he was considered the heavy favorite for re-election, considering Al Franken's long record of potentially controversial jokes, a strange tax issue (he failed to pay taxes on speaking fees in different states) and his difficulty uniting the Democratic base. (After Franken locked up the Democratic nomination at a state convention, he drew a bitter primary challenger who attacked him for his "record of pornography and degradation of women and minorities" and drew 30 percent of the primary vote.)

Add this to Coleman's ongoing legal problems and considerable debt and it's really quite strange that reporters handicap his chances for a comeback in an election only 16 months away.