In any case, as there’s certainly no evidence the Heaths didn’t pay for the care they received in Canada. In fact, visiting Americans typically did (and still do). 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.
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.
