Kevin Libin: Sarah Palin knows her Canadian health care history. Do we?

Kevin Libin pens the following in the National Post (emphasis added):

American journalists, in calling Palin—a vocal opponent of socialized medicine—a hypocrite for admitting on Saturday to having used Canadian health care as a child, are this time the ones looking foolish....

Put aside the fact that it was Palin’s parents—not the future vice-presidential candidate, who was born in 1964 and not older than a pre-schooler during the ‘60s—who were the ones responsible for making the choice to travel to Canada....

[T]here’s certainly no evidence the Heaths didn’t pay for the care they received in Canada. In fact, visiting Americans typically did. Actually, in the ‘60s, Canadians often did. U.S. journalists seem happy to take it for granted that health care up here has always looked exactly like it does today, but it hasn’t. As blogger Matthew Campbell rightly points out “if Palin’s family did travel in the mid-1960s, they would not have used the same state-run system that Canada uses today.” Rather, they would have used a system that looked and operated much like the American system at the time.

The massive policy changes that brought us the modern Canadian medicare we have today actually took place in 1984, with the passage of the Canadian Health Act. Ottawa and the province began funding doctor visits and hospitals in the 1960s, creating a form of "universal" care, but it was still legal, for medical providers to charge fees for costs not covered by the funding formula—and frequently, they did...

When Palin called it “ironic” that her family once traveled to Canada for health care, she clearly meant that Canada’s system was at one time as good, or perhaps even superior to America’s, but changes to socialization had changed things dramatically since then. Whether you think Canada’s system is better than the U.S.’s or the other way around doesn’t matter: the fact is we’re talking about a very different system than the one that existed here nearly 40 years ago. Journalists who are so inclined need not look far to find signs of pretense in the Sarah Palin shtick (I considered a few myself in my column this week on her Calgary visit). Her stance on Canadian health care isn’t one of them.

Lidbin also claims that Palin said the following at the Calgary event:

"We lost the [American] reporters on the way up here, because we usually have folks following us with cameras and pens and paper, they want to write something about what we're doing. I told them we were flying up north, but they misunderstood and they booked their flights to New Hampshire," she joked to great laughter. She may have been on to something.