Palin in hot water over revelations of medical treatment in Canada

CALGARY - A weekend admission by US vice-presidential hopeful and former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin that her family used to cross the border to get medical treatment in Canada while growing up in Alaska has critics crying foul.

“Believe it or not - this was in the 1960s - we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse,” The Globe and Mail quoted Palin, as having said.

“I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada,” she added.

Referring to the statement made by Palin, the Conservative website Reason.com said that the Canadian public health care was in its infancy in the 1960s, so it was hardly a case of a family abandoning American private care for the superior Canadian alternative.

Meanwhile, Sam Stein, a Political Reporter at the Huffington Post, highlighted Palin’s views which recently described Canada’s health-care system as revolting.

“Clearly, however, she and her family once found it more alluring than, at the very least, the coverage available in rural Alaska,” Stein said.

Palin, who was the Republicans’ 2008 vice presidential nominee, has not always been consistent in recounting family care when she was a child, the paper claimed.

The Skagway News pointed out that, in 2007, when she told a similar story, only the family traveled by ferry to Juneau rather than by train to Whitehorse after her brother burned his foot adly jumping through a fire. (ANI)