Greetings, you're listening to podcast number 155 of Blasterite.

I'm your host Jack Clark, great to have you on board.

More on the healthcare debate, more right wing lies debunked, more hard-called facts you can throw at your friendly

local right wingers to stop them in their tracks.

Let's get right into it.

Your sources today include the New York Times, Media Matters.org, Common Dreams.org, The Economist, MSNBC.com, CNN, The Nation magazine, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, The CIA Factbook,

USA Today, and Reuters.

I usually try to vary the issues from podcast to podcast, but certain times you can't do that.

The healthcare debate is dominating radio, cable TV, and the water cooler wars like nothing else.

So here you'll get some new facts, here's some points made in prior shows amplified on, and see how to go on the offensive in your discussions.

Today's show stands on its own. For the most comprehensive take on the entire healthcare debate, I strongly urge you to listen to podcasts 152 and 154, as well as today's.

Check out all three, and you'll be armed and dangerous, figuratively speaking, to go verbally kick some right wing butt.

To start things off, what would any episode of Blasterite be like without one of Sean Hannity's patented, misrepresentations of the truth?

Take a listen and tonight's Universal Nightmare segment is brought to you by the UK's National Health Service, a British man named Mark Watson visited this hospital to have his appendix removed.

Now to his surprise, he returned to this very same hospital, a month later, with a ruptured appendix.

That's right, the first time around, the hospital actually didn't remove Watson's appendix, and when he went back the second time, he got an infection, which sent him back a third time, and the result, he lost his job.

Now Watson told the London Daily Mail, quote, I had a temporary job at a sports shop, but when I took in two medical certificates saying I had my appendix out twice, well they didn't believe me.

I can barely walk them in constant pain. Don't worry though, a spokesman for the hospital had the following to say, quote, we would like to apologize if Mr. Watson felt dissatisfied with the care that he received at Great Western Hospital.

Well that's comforting, isn't it? Just think, in just a few short weeks, all Americans can be forced into a system just like that one.

Hannity misleads his audience three ways here. Did you catch them?

To start off with, he implies that the British system is rife with such medical errors while hours isn't, yet many countries with universal coverage do far better than us in avoiding medical and surgical errors.

In fact, the best estimate is that 100,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical errors.

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