Alberta's Jepp Quadruplets: Born in the U.S.A.

"The precious gift of American citizenship comes to the Jepp Quads because there were no hospital facilities anywhere in Canada able to handle 4 neonatal intensive care babies...the Jepp quads will be eligible to run for the presidency of the United States when they reach the age of 35, having been born in Benefis Hospital in Great Falls, Montana," wrote Thomas Lifson, editor of American Thinker, Aug.17, 2007. Lifson points out that the Jepps had to travel 325 miles from Calgary, a wealthy Canadian city of over a million people, to Great Falls, a city of under one hundred thousand, whose hospital facilities had no problem accommodating the Jepps' specific situation.

Let's not tell Michael Moore that Canadian patients (hostages of a government-run, single-payer 'health-scare' monopoly) are forced to flee to the States for needed service. The Calgary Herald reported (Aug.17, 2007) that five women have been transferred this year south of the border because of neonatal shortages in Calgary.

This situation is not an obscure anomaly - it's happening in Alberta; it's happening in Ontario; it's happening right in Niagara, where patients are regularly shuffled off to Buffalo, N.Y., and beyond, for medical treatment which Canada's sicko, supposedly 'universal' system is unable to provide. Don't tell Moore that the Jepps went, not to Cuba, but to the U.S. system which Moore so despises.

CTV News (AUG.17, 2007) reported "It cost $30,000 for each day Karen Jepp and her babies received care in the Montana hospital. In Calgary, it would have cost less than $11,000 per day." What an irrelevant factoid, when the real point is: no matter what the cost "would have" been in Canada, there was NO AVAILABLE SERVICE! The reality is that Canada's much-trumpeted theory of "universality" failed to deliver the quads, so to speak, in Canada! And let's not confuse price with cost - in Canada, there was no care available to the Jepp family, in their time of need, at any price. (Please, read that again) The cost was unnecessary emotional turmoil, uncertainty, and anxious inconvenience, and it cost the quads the opportunity to have been born in their own country.

Canada's great myth of universality requires that we have an unspoken, symbiotic relationship with the American system, which acts as a relief-valve when our patriotic, but duplicitous, health-care rhetoric is suddenly overshadowed by health-care reality.

And unfortunately it's quite popular for many, mostly so-called 'liberals' on both sides of the border to deride and resent the American system. That is, until we need it.

I'm grateful that the States are there for us.