McCain's health care

When you've spent all your life enjoying the benefits of taxpayer-funded health care, you really shouldn't deride taxpayer-funded health care. That's a lesson John McCain should have learned by now.
But he hasn't.
This week, a journalist in Iowa posed a legitimate question to the U.S. presidential candidate: "Throughout your adult life, am I right, as a veteran and a member of Congress and now someone over 65, have you always been covered ... by a taxpayer-financed health care plan?"
His response was a seemingly reluctant acknowledgment that, yes, he has benefited from state-funded health care but he's opposed to it generally because has too much faith in the free market and each family's ability to make the best choices. Oh, and there's that whole "government bureaucracy" problem.
Health care is one policy area in which the United States is some 40-plus years behind Canada. In the early 1960s, Saskatchewanians heard the same arguments against "socialized" medicine that U.S. citizens are still giving respectful attention. The issue has been settled, Canadians have a single-payer system, and only market ideologues and extreme libertarians would have it any other way.