If America adopts universal health care, what will become of quantum physics?

Some weeks ago, a conservative newspaper called Investors’ Business Daily ran an editorial stating, “Scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K.” because, as a result of a degenerative disease that has left him paralyzed, “National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man ... is essentially worthless.”

Hawking, who is British and has lived in the U.K. his entire life, responded that he “would not be here today” if not for Britain’s public health-care system.

At this point, can the G.O.P. really get any more ridiculous? It is as though the Republican voice in America has imploded on itself, leaving behind a black hole of fanaticism unrestrained by logic and hell-bent on discrediting President Barack Obama at any cost.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Jim DeMint summed up the G.O.P’s philosophy of destruction succinctly when he stated that preventing health care reform “will be [Obama’s] Waterloo. It will break him.”

And so the distortion of public health care began.

In mid-August, after abandoning her post as Governor of Alaska mid-term, Sarah Palin authored an infamous Facebook post suggesting that Obama planned to impose a Hitler-style eugenics program.

“The America I know and love,” she blogged, “is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide ... whether they are worthy of health care.”

Despite the fact that Obama is proposing nothing of the sort, a lobby group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights — with help from the public relations firm responsible for the “swift boat” ads that destroyed John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign — began releasing commercials featuring Brits and Canadians warning Americans about the perils of socialized medicine.

These ads, intended to terrify Americans into opposing health care reform, suggest that Canadians lack ready access to care and routinely die or wither away on waiting lists, that government-run systems create bureaucratic nightmares and that Canadians are not happy with their current health-care system.

Here are some facts about the Canadian health-care system:

1. The median wait time for diagnostic imaging like MRIs is three weeks. Patients with medical emergencies are fast-tracked.

2. Only 1.3 cents of every dollar spent on health care in Canada goes to administration fees (the United States spends 31 cents on the dollar).

3. 86 percent of Canadians rate their health care as “high” and are “extremely satisfied.”

And it’s also free for everybody.

So then who are these Canadians on our television screens telling us horror stories about public health care?

Well, the most prominently featured Canadian, Dr. Brian Day, is the owner of the largest for-profit surgical hospital in Canada and is currently under investigation for illegal billing practices.

As for the rest: they could very well be legitimate examples of patients who simply slipped through the cracks. Unfortunately, medical malpractice is a reality north and south of the 49th parallel. Thankfully it doesn’t happen very often.

And, for what it’s worth, my experience with the public health care system as a Canadian has been nothing short of excellent.

The truth about Canadian health care is that it is a system driven by a case-by-case sense of urgency and, overwhelmingly, Canadian medical professionals do a hell of a job setting their priorities.

Wait times should be lower for some procedures (particularly elective ones), and most provincial governments are finding ways to do just that. But to suggest, for instance, that Canadians with cancer are left to die on lengthy waiting lists is not only factually incorrect but delusional as well.

However, these pesky truths are of no concern for Republicans as the G.O.P in 2009 does not deal in facts or fairness: It ignores that insurance premiums in the United States have doubled in the past eight years; that Americans spend much more on health care per capita than the rest of the world but are no healthier; that well over half of all bankruptcies in the United States are triggered by medical bills.

It is as though the G.O.P’s desire to “break” Obama and discredit his proposals — by stepping outside of the United States and trashing the health-care system of the country next door — outweighs its sense of duty to be honest with the citizens it wishes to govern.

And it doesn’t take Stephen Hawking, or even your average quantum physicist, to see that the politics of spite will only serve to further diminish the Republican party.

Cody Gault is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at cgault@cornellsun.com. Stakes Is High appears alternate Fridays this semester.