U.S. tweet sparks love-in over public health care
This is a lesson in medical anatomy. The anatomy of a viral tweet.
Our story starts in Brooklyn, N.Y., on the morning of Thursday, July 26.
It starts with Nathan Rubin. Rubin, 28, is the founder of Millennial Politics, a website and podcast aimed at young American progressives. The digital media company started as a reaction to U.S. President Donald Trump’s election.
Last Thursday morning, Rubin tweeted this:
“Millennials don’t hear socialism and think about the USSR or the Cold War. We hear socialism and think about Canada, Switzerland, health care, social security, affordable college, and affordable housing. Big generational difference,” read the first tweet.
Five hours later, he followed up with a more explanatory tweet.
“To everyone saying ‘You know those countries aren’t actually socialist, right?’ Yes — and that’s the point! We want socialized medicine. Subsidized education. Public infrastructure. Public schools. Public art. Fire departments. Etc. Less like Venezuela, more like Canada.”
That might well have been that: a young American journalist, paying Canada a compliment most of us would never have seen.
But sometimes, Twitter threads morph in strange and unexpected ways.
Rubin had a lot of replies to his tweet. But the most important one, the one most important to this story, at least, came the next day, from James R. Christensen — or a least someone who uses that name online.
“You want socialized medicine?” said Christensen, who tweets under the handle @USSCobblerguy.
“Tell me again about how good Canadian health care is. Tell me about the wait times for serious medical procedures. Did you guys learn anything from the complete failure of ObamaCare?”
Rubin saw the tweet. But he didn’t pay it much heed.
“Some bot or troll responded to me. But I didn’t think anything of it,” he told me.
Suddenly, he noticed a crazy number of notifications on his phone. But people weren’t responding to his original tweet. They were responding to USS-Cobblerguy. Thousands and thousands of Canadians, sharing their intimate, moving, powerful, painful, funny stories of times when Canada’s public health care system worked for them.
Christensen’s account only has 56 followers. It’s not as though thousands of Canadians were monitoring his tweets — or Rubin’s. But somehow, through the viral vagaries of Twitter, Canadians started to take Christensen at his word. They started to tell him again — and again — how good Canadian health care is.
Stories of babies saved in neonatal ICU. Stories of cancer treatment.
Stories of treatment in emergency departments. Stories of brain surgeries and heart surgeries and hip replacements and angioplasties. Canadians praising a public health-care system that treated them and their loved ones, without ever sending a bill.
In response came stories from Americans, telling their own heart-rending stories of times when America’s private healthcare system failed them. Australians, Brits and New Zealanders joined in, too.
It was a profoundly human conversation, a massive, spontaneous international party line. People shared stories of grief and suffering and medical triumph. They made themselves vulnerable in a way you rarely see on Twitter.
And people wanted to listen. I added my own tweet to the mix on Sunday afternoon. As of Wednesday, it has been seen by 149,835 people on Twitter, and thousands more on Reddit — which I don’t even use.
“It was amazing,” said Rubin. “It’s really disgusting to see how different the two systems are. I think it opened a lot of people’s eyes, because we don’t always get the full story.”
In the U.S., he said, there’s lots negative press about Canadian health case, stories about long waits, about Canadians crossing the border for treatment. It was enlightening, he said, for people to see so many Canadians testifying about how public health care had saved them.
Now, if we’re honest, we Canadians know perfectly well that our health-care system isn’t perfect.
Complaining about it is a national pastime. We know about long emergency rooms waits. We know about surge capacity days, when patients sleep on gurneys in hallways, or cram in with three beds in a room built for two. We know our aging hospital buildings need repairs. We know public health care eats up almost 40 per cent of Alberta’s provincial budget.
But we also know our healthcare system is there for us in a crisis. We know we can get worldclass care, without needing to mortgage our homes or declare personal bankruptcy. And we know that even if we complain among ourselves about its flaws, we’re not going to let Americans trash-talk it.
Now, after that cathartic outpouring, we need to ensure we protect, defend and improve something that means so much to us — to maintain public health care in which we can take legitimate pride.