If you'd like to learn more about what I'm talking about and you have high-speed internet, invite your friends and neighbors over to watch a half-hour Bill Moyers' PBS interview with ex-Cigna Insurance top man Wendell Potter. Potter, a reformed prostitute, spilled the beans about the talking points scripted by the health care industry. Poodle Pat followed the script.

Last Friday, Moyers interviewed Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medical reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School. Angell is a former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. Watch that, too. (If you don't have high-speed net, read the scripts of the interviews.)

According to Opensecrets.org, which tracks such things, in the 2005-2010 campaign cycle, Sen. Pat Roberts has received some $940 thousand in individual and PAC campaign contributions from the finance, real estate and insurance sector -- more than from any other special interest. He's got plenty of company.

Recently on C-SPAN, I listened to Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (with whom Roberts votes more often than any other senator) bad mouth public health care. Her number one contributor? The same interest group as Roberts', approximately $1.2 million.

And while the Republicans hold a wide edge, Sen. Max Baucus, that blue-dog Democrat naysay'er on public health care is no slouch. He took in a cool $2 million from the same interest group. Of course, Max would say he doesn't owe anybody anything for it. (You believe that, don't you?)

I sent a copy of Poodle Pat's column to my nephew now living in Toronto, a common-sense Kansas native. He's worked abroad as a pharmacist in a US for-profit hospital in the United Arab Emirates, then for three decades in Canada as a hospital administrator and a government health-care specialist, and now as a health care consultant.

"Skip, take a look at this. The Repubs want desperately to shoot down health-care reform that includes any public option." I could see him shaking his head in disbelief.

"The health care war is over," he responded. "The U.S. lost."

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation on the planet that does not have some form of universal health care, yet we spend more per capita than any other country. The latest figure for the U.S. (2007) is $5,711. even though 47 million have no health insurance. For comparison, the average per capita spending of 31 developed nations is about $2500. Canada spent just $2,998 and covers everybody.

Ah, but doesn't the U.S. have the best health care in the world? Not if outcomes are important. Of 31 industrialized nations, the U.S. is 26th in average life expectancy -- fifth from the bottom. Canada ranks 9th -- from the top.

In addition to Canadians living longer, Canada has 219 deaths per 100 thousand from heart disease; the U.S. has 265. Canada has relatively fewer deaths from digestive and intestinal diseases. It has a lower infant mortality rate, and less than half the rate of child maltreatment deaths. Those are representative comparisons. Skip figures if the U.S. bought its health care from Canada, it could save us taxpayers $820 billion every year. And we'd probably all be healthier. But don't get overly excited.

"We aren't really socialists up here, you know," he wrote, undoubtedly with a chuckle. He says the Canucks might cut us a deal to administrate our screwed-up system and save us $677 billion annually. "We would want to profit from our expertise so your savings would be slightly less."

I got a hoot out of that -- but Pat Roberts, the insurance industry and the pharmaceuticals wouldn't. They don't like Wendell Potter either.