This article is over a year old, but still quite relevant, as the pot is stirred and the debate over healthcare reform becomes increasingly nasty and bipartisan.

It’s entitled 10 Myths About Canadian Health Care, Busted, written by a person with experience on both sides of the border. While everyone has their own statistics to pull out of a hat, and their own experiences, the writer does knock down a lot of the myths.

But the bottom line is that we should be looking at what works with the Canadian system, rather than making up stories about it, or inflating its shortcomings. The vast majority of Canadians would never change their system for ours, and for good reason.

US News and World Report has once again come out with its ranking of Children’s Hospitals in the U.S. The rankings also appear in the August issue of  scheduled for publication July 21.

While most of the top facilities are well known and have good repuations, I think it is important to read the fine print on this. Selecting the top facilities is not a scientific study. It is not an objective evaluation that is conducted by an independent monitoring group. And most important, all childrens hospitals are not represented.

This is basically, a subjective survey. Yes, survey. It is mailed to hospitals, and they respond, and then the ranking is figured out in-house at the magazine.

Hospitals were ranked by reputation, medical outcomes, and care-related indicators such as patient volume, nursing staff, and availability of specialized programs based on answers to a 65-page survey developed by health care specialists for the magazine.

Of the 160 hospitals contacted, 98 responded.

So essentially, hospitals can fill in whatever they want, and embellish if hey desire, and no one is going to check up on them. No one is checking to see if their nurse to patient ratio is really 1:4. Or how accessible their specifialty programs are. And so on. And according to this, 62 hospitals did not respond. Maybe they were too busy taking care of patients to worry abou filling out a survey?