Let me say to the American public: if you hear somebody saying, we can't afford healthcare reform, because...if they use any of these words: "socialization," or "government control of your healthcare decisions," or if they mention "England," "France," or "Canada," you can be assured that they are not telling you the truth. They are trying to scare you away from a plan that can make a real difference, not just in American families, but in the American economy as a whole.
                                                                                                                 Elizabeth Edwards

A  few figures from Sadly, No.

Circulatory disease deaths per 100,000:

• Canada: 219

• United States: 265

Child maltreatment deaths per 100,000:

• Canada: 0.7

• United States: 2.2

Digestive disease deaths per 100,000:

• Canada: 17.4

• United States: 20.5

Infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births

• Canada: 5.08

• United States: 6.3

Intestinal diseases death rate

• Canada: 0.3%

• United States: 7.3%

Proability of not reaching age 60:

• Canada: 9.5%

• United States: 12.8%

Respiratory disease child death rate per 100,000

• Canada: 0.62

• United States: 40.43

Heart disease deaths per 100,000:

• Canada: 94.9

• United States: 106.5

HIV deaths per million people:

• Canada: 47.423

• United States: 48.141

Republicans obstruct House proceedings to attend Boehner’s annual beach party.

FROM THINKPROGRESS.ORG

Yesterday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) took the unusual step of requesting the House clerk to read aloud a 55-page motion to recommit, a process that took over 40 minutes. The obstructionist tactic, the Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports, appears to have been orchestrated by the GOP in order to delay House proceedings so Republicans could attend the annual “Boehner Beach Party” fundraising event at the Cantina Marina, a D.C. restaurant near the waterfront. Party Time, a blog maintained by the Sunlight Foundation, obtained a copy of the invite for Rep. John Boehner’s (R-OH) event. View it below:

Boehner’s spokesman has claimed that the stalling was part of a “protest” against Democrats. However, after Democratic aides pointed out that members seemed to be leaving for Boehner’s party, Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) sheepishly returned to the floor to apologize to his colleagues for the “delay here.” CQ reported that while the House clerk labored to finish a task that is typically dispensed with in seconds by unanimous consent, a Boehner spokesman sent an e-mail saying that he was “headed down now” to the party.

FROM THINKPROGRESS.ORG 

The Washington Post's Harold Mayerson rips into the Blue Dogs:

Centrist Democrats' opposition to health reform verges on the incoherent. A caucus (the Blue Dogs) formed ostensibly to promote balanced budgets now disapproves of the proposed taxes that would cover the expenses of the new programs. The congressional centrists say, commendably, that they want to squeeze more economies out of the system, but they oppose giving more power to an agency that would set the payment scales for physicians.

[...] The Republican opposition to President Obama's push for health-care reform, on the other hand, makes clear political sense. If they can stop Obama on health care, as South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint recently noted, it "will be his Waterloo." Why Democrats of any ideology want to cripple their own president in his first year in office, and for seeking an objective that has been a stated goal of their party since the Truman administration, is a more mysterious matter.

Is the additional tax burden on small businesses their concern? If so, good news: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found that only the top 4 percent of those businesses would be affected by the surcharge that House Democratic leaders proposed, and that's based on the original proposal, before Speaker Nancy Pelosi altered it to include just the wealthiest fraction of the top 1 percent of Americans. Would such a tax impede an economic recovery? In downturns this severe, it's been broad-based consumer spending and public-sector investment that have revived the economy. Private investment doesn't jump-start a revival of purchasing; it follows it.

But the big picture here, of which the resistance to reforming health care is just one element, is our growing inability to meet our national challenges. Almost all of the major nations with which we trade, for instance, have quasi-mercantilist policies that lead them to champion their own higher-wage growth industries, often in manufacturing. In America alone are such policies considered anathema. In consequence, as the Alliance for American Manufacturing reports in a new book, we shuttered 40,000 factories from 2001 through 2007 -- the years, ostensibly of prosperity, between the past two downturns. The diminution of manufacturing, which employs just 11 percent of the U.S. workforce, may please Wall Street, which looks with disfavor on decent-wage domestic production, and Wal-Mart, which tripled its purchases from China (from $9 billion to $27 billion annually) during roughly the same years those American factories closed, but it poses a clear threat to the nation's economic, and even military, power.

But act on behalf of the nation as a whole, even if it means goring Wall Street's or Wal-Mart's oxen? Perish the thought. Pass a health-reform bill that will cover 45 million uninsured Americans and slow the ruinous growth of health-care spending? Not if somebody, somewhere, actually has to pay higher taxes. Hey, we're America -- the can't-do nation.

As our former president might put it, Heckuva job, Brownies.